SFARI announces that it has selected five fellows in response to the 2019 Bridge to Independence Award request for applications.

Funds donated by SFARI to Gordon Research Conferences will now be allocated to support attendance of eligible early-career (pre-tenure) women, early-career trainees from historically underrepresented groups and scientists from the following ethnic and racial groups: Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.

SFARI is now curating a set of zebrafish lines to study autism spectrum disorder. This includes mutant lines for 12 ASD risk genes, four of which are currently available to researchers and eight that will be available later this year.

SFARI director Louis Reichardt will leave SFARI this coming October.

SFARI has awarded four grants in response to the 2019 Novel Outcome Measures in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) request for applications. These grants will support the development and validation of outcome measures aimed at assessing core symptoms of ASD and behavioral changes following treatment.

Six current and past SFARI Investigators were among the 100 newly elected members of the National Academy of Medicine.

A number of SFARI Investigators, collaborators and Simons Foundation scientists will present their latest research findings related to the genomic and transcriptomic architecture of autism spectrum disorder and other neurodevelopmental conditions at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), which will be held October 15–19 in Houston, TX.

SFARI Investigators will give a number of presentations at Neuroscience 2019 in Chicago, IL (October 19–23).

Findings from the first SPARK genetics study have now been published. The study, which analyzed whole-exome and genome-wide genotyping data from 457 autism families, confirmed known genetic findings and identified new candidate autism risk genes.

New Simons Searchlight data were recently added to SFARI Base. This data release included phenotypic data from individuals with 16p11.2 copy number variants (CNVs), 1q21.1 CNVs and variants in 21 single genes associated with autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.