Benjamin Blencowe holds the Banbury Chair in Medical Research and the Canada Research Chair in RNA Biology and Genomics at the University of Toronto. He also serves as director of the University of Toronto Donnelly Sequencing Centre.
Hiroki Asari is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL Rome, Italy).
Connie Kasari received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Since 1990, she has been on the faculty at UCLA, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and has been the primary advisor to more than 60 Ph.D. students. She is a founding member of the Center for Autism Research and Treatment at UCLA.
Rachel Jurd is a freelance science writer and editor. Prior to becoming a freelancer, she served as the editor of SFARI.org, where she contributed to the communication of SFARI’s scientific priorities, research portfolio and resources for scientists.
Mani Ramaswami is the professor of neurogenetics at Trinity College Dublin. Ramaswami’s laboratory was among the first to combine cell biology and genetics to analyze synaptic mechanisms in Drosophila. His current work is focused on neuronal functions of RNA-granules and RNA-binding proteins in vivo and neural circuit mechanisms involved in behavioral habituation. Based on his laboratory's studies of olfactory habituation in Drosophila, Ramaswami recently proposed that habituation may be generally mediated by inhibitory representations or negative images of excitatory stimulus ensembles created by a specific form of excitation-inhibition balancing that is altered in autism spectrum disorders.