Interdisciplinary Science to Learn About Autism - ISLA Network
About Us
Over 20 years ago at the University of Utah, Dr. Janet Lainhart began the Interdisciplinary Science to Learn about Autism (ISLA) study of autism from childhood to adulthood. The goal of the ISLA study was to better understand how clinical characteristics and the brain change over time in autistic (neurodiverse) and neurotypical individuals. The wonderful participants of the study returned time and time again to contribute to the study’s endeavors, making the ISLA study one of the longest running longitudinal studies of children and young adults with autism.
Our new study, Toward Healthy Aging in Autism, is an NIH-funded Autism Centers of Excellence project that will build upon the original ISLA study. Now spanning multiple institutions, this study will continue to follow the original ISLA study participants and enroll new participants at several sites: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Utah, and the University of Florida. This collaboration between multiple sites forms the Interdisciplinary Science to Learn About Autism – Aging (ISLA-A) Network.
The ISLA-A Network is a highly multidisciplinary team of researchers. Our group consists of psychiatrists, psychologists, geneticists, medical physicists, neuroscientists, social workers, and statisticians – all who have joined forces to study autism spectrum disorder. The islands in our logo represent the different disciplines coming together for this important, shared goal.
Our goal is to develop the first prospective comprehensive longitudinal study of aging in autism.
“I believe your ACE-Network proposal will be transformative to the field of autism, providing critical, multimodality data about health-related outcomes, genetics, and neurobiology in aging autistic adults.
I cannot think of a more experienced and qualified interdisciplinary research team than the one you have assembled.”
— Douglas C. Dean III, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Medical Physics, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Learning from Individuals with Autism
The ISLA-A Network is a dynamic team of researchers with varied expertise, all coming together to deploy a harmonized, optimized, and innovative protocol to investigate the effects of aging in autism.