Ilan Dinstein, Ph.D.

Ilan Dinstein is an associate professor in the departments of Psychology and of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University (BGU), Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Center for Neural Science at New York University in 2010 and then completed postdoctoral training in the neurobiology department at the Weizmann Institute and the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dinstein has an extensive track record of studying the function of sensory and motor systems in the human brain with a particular focus on autism and early development. He uses a variety of neuroimaging techniques including anatomical and function magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and EEG in combination with behavioral tools that include eye tracking, body-motion tracking, psychophysics, cognitive testing and standardized clinical assessments.

Dinstein is particularly interested in understanding how the neurophysiology of toddlers with autism may differ from that of typically developing toddlers. With this aim in mind, he has lead the creation of the Negev Autism Center at BGU, where a wide variety of behavioral, clinical and biological measures are collected from over 200 new cases of autism annually.

Dinstein has received numerous fellowships, grants, private donations and awards in relation to his autism research. He has published over 25 papers in high-impact journals including Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Current Biology and others.