Natasha Marrus is a child psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU Medicine). Her clinical practice has focused on children with autism and co-occurring psychiatric conditions, including early childhood evaluations and school consultations.

Marrus received her M.D. and Ph.D. at WashU Medicine, where she completed her neuroscience Ph.D. with Aaron DiAntonio studying synaptic development in Drosophila. Following her child psychiatry fellowship at WashU Medicine, she joined John Constantino’s Social Developmental Studies Laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry for her post-doctoral training. As part of her postdoctoral work, she developed a metric of autistic traits for toddlers and applied family study designs to quantify familial ASD recurrence risk, including when accounting for sex of affected family members.

Marrus’ current work focuses on advancing scalable quantitative social, motor, and attentional measures for ASD endophenotypes that can improve screening and individualized treatments in ASD, as well as characterization of longitudinal brain and behavioral development in autism and Down syndrome through collaborations with the Infant Brain Imaging Study Network. Dr. Marrus also serves as co-Director of WashU Medicine’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC). Together with IDDRC co-director Joseph Dougherty, she supports the advancement of clinical translational science for patients with neurodevelopmental conditions by leveraging WashU Medicine’s multidisciplinary strengths in basic science, genetics, and quantitative phenotyping, as well as fostering team science and community engagement.