Suma Jacob is the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was previously the Gloria and Dr. Martin Segal Family Professor at the University of Minnesota. She is a child-adolescent-adult psychiatrist and neuroscientist with expertise in autism and other conditions that affect rigid, inflexible behaviors and social functioning.

Jacob has funding to use data-driven approaches to investigate biobehavioral differences in early childhood that predict dimensional and categorical disorder outcomes. With collaborators, she is exploring alternative statistical and machine learning computational approaches to identify differences in developmental outcomes, decision and functional abilities, and brain-behavioral profiles across the lifespan.

Her early work explored genetic and neuroendocrine biomarkers and her current research focuses on phenotypic measurement across neurodevelopmental conditions and their trajectories. In addition to having been a site-PI for SPARK for more than seven years, Jacob collaborates on implementation research projects and international and national clinical trials for neurodevelopmental conditions.