Meghan Swanson, PhD

Meghan Swanson, PhD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota where she also serves as the Associate Director for the Center for Neurobehavioral Development. Dr. Swanson received her PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York where she studied the social communication of autistic children using eye tracking, and worked on a parent-mediated intervention for autistic toddlers. While completing postdoctoral training in neuroimaging and neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was awarded a NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00). As a developmental and cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Swanson’s program of research is focused on the neurobiology of communication for infants who develop autism. She also studies how infants and their parents communicate and how this early communication supports brain development and later language skills. The overarching goal of Dr. Swanson’s work is to identify outcome and monitoring biomarkers for the next generation of autism intervention studies. She co-directs the Cognition and Neurodevelopmental Studies (CNS) Lab at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, which receives funding from the NICHD, NIMH, and NIDCD.