Abigail Dickinson, PhD

Abigail Dickinson, Ph.D. is an Assistant Research Neuroscientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and a faculty member of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART). She received her Master’s degree in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and her Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield, UK, where she specialized in EEG markers of autism and sensory processing, before completing postdoctoral training at UCLA and expanding her focus to early development and longitudinal studies of infants at elevated likelihood for autism.

Dr. Dickinson’s research sits at the intersection of basic and clinical science, focusing on the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder. She has specific expertise in using EEG to characterize early brain development, with the goal of developing scalable, objective biomarkers that can inform diagnosis, patient stratification, and clinical trial design. Her work has contributed to linking neural activity patterns, such as spectral power and peak alpha frequency, to later developmental outcomes in autism and related genetic conditions including tuberous sclerosis complex. A core focus has been developing EEG paradigms and processing pipelines that span the full breadth of the autism spectrum, including individuals with limited language and those with profound autism, so that these tools can be meaningfully deployed in more representative populations.