Jessica Girault, PhD

Dr. Girault is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Psychiatry with an appointment at the Carolina Institute for Neurodevelopmental Disabilities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist with more than 10 years of experience working on large-scale pediatric neuroimaging studies and an active program of research on brain and behavioral development in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and genetic syndromes with associated features (fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome). Her technical expertise includes longitudinal analysis of multimodal neuroimaging datasets, as well as quantitative investigations of clinical-behavioral data in infants and toddlers. Her recent work has focused on examining the developing visual system in infants at high familial likelihood for autism.

Dr. Girault is an investigator with several team-science initiatives, including the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) Network which is a large, multi-site prospective longitudinal study of brain and behavior development in ASD. As part of IBIS, Dr. Girault oversees the collection of biospecimen (blood, saliva) and biomarker data (EEG, eye-tracking, and MRI) spanning the infancy to adolescence and serves on the Genetics Committee that steers IBIS iPSC and genomics projects. She is also an investigator with the international Baby Siblings Research Consortium (BSRC) and the ENIGMA ORIGINs workgroup and is Co-PI of the UNC Early Brain Development Study that has followed infants from birth to early adulthood.