Robert Schultz, Ph.D.

Robert Schultz is the Regional Autism Center Endowed Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and the founder and director of the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

His Ph.D. training was in clinical psychology, behavior genetics and cognitive neuroscience. As an assistant professor at the Yale Child Study Center, Schultz began a career-long focus on childhood psychopathology and has gained experience with a range of childhood disorders, including autism, intellectual disability, genomic syndromes, Tourette syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Since moving to CHOP/UPenn in 2007, an important focus of his work has been on how best to acquire useful ‘big data’ for clinical translational science, and more recently, he has shifted his focus to the computational analyses of behavior using a digital phenotyping approach that involves computer vision analyses of synchronous nonverbal facial communicate signals, gait, praxis and body coordination.