MRI Autism Reward Study
- Prof. Louise Gallagher
Prof. Louise Gallagher is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin and Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist with the HSE/National Children’s Hospital, Tallaght. Prof. Gallagher is a the lead investigator of the Autism Research Group based at the Department of Psychiatry and Institute of Molecular Medicine, St. James’s Hospital. The autism group is a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, scientists and post-graduate students. Their work encompasses clinical assessment, neuropychology, neurophysiology, neuroimaging, molecular genetics, bioinformatics and functional biology.
Prof. Gallaghers studies at CAMI are using functional and structural neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI and DTI, to investigate the neural basis of reward processing in Autism Spectrum Conditions. Participants perform computer-based tasks that involve receiving different kinds of rewards. This allows us to investigate differences in brain activation between people with Autism and controls. The structural integrity of the neural reward network, in the fronto-striatal system, is being investigated using volumetric measures and diffusion tensor imaging.
If you would like to find out more, or if you would like to volunteer for this study, please contact Sonja Delmonte at Tel. 01-8964102; e-mail sdelmont@tcd.ie.
To visit Prof. Gallagher's Autism Research homepage please click here.