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Thanks to a $21.9 million grant from the late Bernie Marcus and The Marcus Foundation, Marcus Autism Center, a subsidiary of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, announced they will conduct the largest-ever study of behavior, brain and genomic biomarkers in children across the autism spectrum and associated genetic neurodevelopmental conditions to better understand what causes autism severity and elicits a treatment response in those with profound autism. The goal is to identify mechanisms that can be changed to optimize outcomes and generate new therapies. In a collaboration with Children’s Behavioral and Mental Health and Neurosciences Research Programs, Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Human Genetics, and the Tri-Institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS), 7,500 children from birth to 12-years of age will participate.
“The goal is to enable precision medicine interventions that will accelerate learning, make symptoms less severe and improve response to treatment in children with profound autism, and possibly even prevent profound disability from emerging in the first place,” said Ami Klin, PhD, Principal Investigator and Director of the Marcus Autism Center. “If successful, our research could usher in a new era of behavior-brain-genomic precision medicine to optimize outcomes of children in a community that cannot wait.”
Led by Dr. Klin, researchers at Marcus Autism Center will conduct an embedded pragmatic clinical trial occurring during regular clinical practice with findings integrated into standard-of-care services. Researchers will study children from birth, before symptoms emerge, as well as before and after treatment is delivered. The research will utilize multi-omic and behavioral neuroscience measures to discover key modifiable factors leading to profound autism.
“Most treatments we have right now are behaviorally based,” said Dr. Klin, who is also a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, the Bernie Marcus Distinguished Chair in Autism, Professor and Division Chief of Autism and Developmental Disabilities at Emory University School of Medicine. "By studying profound autism at multiple levels—in behavior, brain networks, and basic biology—one of the key goals is to identify new biological targets for drugs and other therapies: to support learning and adaptability, to make symptoms less severe, and to promote better quality of life for children and families affected by profound autism.”
“This represents the largest scientific effort to date to study children with profound autism from infancy to early adolescence, and to develop actionable predictors that can improve treatment response, while personalizing treatments and developing new ones,” said Dr. Klin. “We hope to generate a moonshot factory of solutions for a community that carries the most severe symptoms of autism and has been under-represented in autism research.”
In the U.S., more than 2.3 million children have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and more than a quarter of them, 620,000, have profound autism. Children with profound autism have severe to profound intellectual disabilities, limited to no verbal communication, and extreme challenges with daily living skills, typically requiring around-the-clock care and support.
Originally published here.
Marcus Autism Center
Congratulations to Karen E. Effinger, MD MS for receiving the ASPHO 2026 Childhood Cancer Survivorship Award for Excellence, funded by Northwestern Mutual. The Northwestern Mutual Award for Excellence in Childhood Cancer Survivorship annually recognizes outstanding contributions of practicing professionals dedicated to this segment of the pediatric hematology/oncology field. The award honors investigators dedicated to improving long-term health, well-being, and quality of life for pediatric cancer survivors. Please click here for more information.
Dr. Effinger is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Kathelen V. Amos Chair for Cancer Survivorship, Emory University School of Medicine, and Co-Director of the Survivor Program, Aflac Cancer & Blood Disorders Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (Aflac)
Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health (REACH) Center
Congratulations to Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, FAAP for being named a 2026 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Dr. Patrick is part of the eleventh annual class comprised of 60 accomplished leaders includes educators, physicians, public servants, and corporate professionals.
The program began on January 21, 2026 in Washington, D.C. The class was selected after a rigorous application and review process, and Scholars were selected based on their leadership growth potential and their personal leadership projects aimed at addressing a problem or need in their community, the country, or the world. Over the course of several months, Scholars will travel to each participating presidential center to learn from former presidents, key former administration officials, business and civic leaders, and leading academics. They will study and put into practice varying leadership principles and exchange ideas to help maximize their impact in the communities they serve. Presidential Leadership Scholars brings together purpose-driven leaders from across the United States to collaborate and make a difference in our nation and world as they learn about leadership through the lens of the presidential experiences of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Please link here for more information.
Stephen Patrick, MD, MPH, MS, FAAP is the O. Wayne Rollins Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management, Rollins School of Public Health; Professor of Pediatrics, Emory School of Medicine; and Neonatologist, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Research and Epidemiology for Adolescent and Child Health (REACH) Center
The Emory Children's Center Vaccine Research Clinic received the Emory School of Medicine 2025 Team Excellence Award in Research/Science on December 10, 2025. In 2025, this team conducted 3,800 study visits for 670 participants across 22 research studies that span vaccine clinical trials and infectious disease epidemiology. The team is committed to advancing safe, effective, accessible vaccines and treatments to protect individuals from infectious diseases and to enhance health and wellbeing for all.
Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV)
Many of us hadn’t heard about coronavirus before March 2020—but that wasn’t the case for Vineet David Menachery, PhD. He remembers exactly where he was when he started hearing about a novel coronavirus circulating in China. It was New Year’s Eve 2019, and he was on a family vacation to India where he had promised his family he wouldn’t work or get online.
“I started getting texts and emails from people in the field, and I couldn’t ignore them,” he said. “It was 10 o’clock at night and I was sitting on the bed using Google Translate to read reports from China before we knew for sure it was coronavirus.”
For Dr. Menachery, those people ‘in the field’ were colleagues who, like him, study virology and immunology. Dr. Menachery had already spent more than a decade studying coronaviruses. This was before he joined the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Emory as a researcher and started collaborating with Children’s as part of the Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV) in 2024, and before he was named one of the most influential researchers in the world by Clarivate in 2025." Back in 2020, he was working at the University of Texas Medical Branch in the Galveston National Lab. Before that, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill where he studied with Ralph Baric, PhD, a world leader in the study of coronaviruses.
“When we first started getting reports, we didn’t know exactly what kind of threat we were facing,” he said. “But by the end of the first week in January, we knew we had a new coronavirus. It started with a sinking worry in January and February, and then in March of 2020 everything hit.”
Dr. Menachery and his colleagues weren’t particularly surprised or caught off guard at first—we had already seen two coronavirus outbreaks in this century—but the scope of this outbreak continued to grow. “There was a lot of work on coronaviruses before 2020 because coronaviruses were not rare events and we knew something like the pandemic could happen,” he said. “We are constantly in situations where animals might have viruses that could infect us. The world is not getting any smaller. Infections like this are inevitable.”
Center for Childhood Infections and Vaccines (CCIV)
Biplab Dasgupta, PhD, MBA, professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, has been named the inaugural Killian Owen Distinguished Professor for Pediatric Cancer. One of the institution’s highest honors, distinguished professorships recognize exceptional faculty achievement and provide an enduring investment in Emory’s academic and research community.
Recognized for his groundbreaking work in glioblastoma signaling and metabolism, Dasgupta is a co-leader of the Translational Cancer Metabolism Initiative and member of the Cell and Molecular Biology Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. He is also a faculty member with the Neuro-Oncology Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
The professorship is made possible through a $2 million commitment from Curing Kids Cancer named for Killian Owen, who passed away from acute lymphocytic leukemia at nine years old. His parents, Gráinne and Clay Owen, founded Curing Kids Cancer in 2005 to celebrate Killian’s life and improve outcomes for children with cancer. Matching support from Emory’s Faculty Eminence Initiative brings the total to $3 million.
“In Killian’s memory, Curing Kids Cancer is committed to funding innovative cancer research that saves lives,” says Gráinne Owen. “We are proud to support researchers like Dr. Dasgupta, whose discoveries offer hope to families facing pediatric cancer,” adds Clay Owen.
Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center (Aflac)
Center for Gastroenterology, Endocrinology, & Nutrition Innovation (GENI)
Children's Center for Neurosciences Research (CCNR)
Congratulations to the pediatric research alliance faculty and staff members who received awards at the Children’s + Emory Annual Faculty, Physician & Staff Awards Ceremony on November 19, 2025 at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Support Building.
Twelve Emory faculty were named today to Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list for 2025, joining the ranks of the world’s most productive and influential scholars. Clarivate, a British-American scientific data and analytics firm, compiles its list based on a worldwide search for scientists and academics with the highest level of scholarly activity — including research papers ranked among the top 1% most cited in their fields — but the selection criterion goes beyond a simple count of published papers or citations. Instead, the firm uses a multilevel method to gauge a scholar’s recognition from a wide-ranging international network of other authors, looking for a lengthy, continuous record of new findings rather than reviews of past discoveries. The analysis is based on a rolling eleven-year period of citations.
Congratulations to our 2025 Atlanta Pediatric Scholars K12 Program awardees, Jairo Fonseca, MD and Nabil Saleem, MD!
The Atlanta Pediatric Scholars Program (K12HD072245; PI: Shari Barkin, MD) is funded by The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and is administered and supported by Emory University Department of Pediatrics and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. This program is a mentored institutional career development program for senior fellows and junior faculty who have recently completed postgraduate clinical training in pediatrics and are committed to launching an independent basic science research career. The program provides a dedicated period of career development including didactic coursework, mentored research training and 75% protected research time towards the pursuit of independent extramural research funding.
Dr. Fonseca’s project, “Impact of TGF‑β on Pediatric HIV Reservoir Establishment and Latency Reversal Strategies,” seeks to uncover new strategies for curing pediatric HIV by studying the immune molecule TGF-β's role in creating and maintaining hidden HIV reservoirs and reducing the effectiveness of latency-reversing drugs. His project mentor is Ann Chahroudi, MD, PhD. Dr. Fonseca is an Instructor, Pediatric Infectious Diseases in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
Dr. Saleem’s project, “Engineering Chemotherapy Resistant CAR T Cells for Acute Myeloid Leukemia,” explores a new way to treat aggressive childhood leukemia (AML) by combining CAR T-cell therapy with chemotherapy, aiming to make CAR T cells resistant to chemotherapy drugs, in order to allow both treatments to work together and improve remission rates for children with hard-to-treat AML. His project mentor is Sunil Raikar, MD. Dr. Saleem is a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellow at the Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
