Here is a short interview with Joaquín Goñi and Nieves Velez de Mendizabal. The two bioinformaticians are affiliate members of the Wall Lab, and currently visiting scholars at Indiana University. (Bonus: article includes a picture of their dog)

The Harvard Medical School and the University of Jaén have agreed to a partnership allowing international mobility of graduate students and research staff between the two institutions.

The agreement has emerged from the close cooperation developed between the Computational Biology Unit (Center for Biomedical Informatics) at Harvard Medical School, directed by Dennis P. Wall, and the Research Group Systems Biology of the University of Jaén, coordinated by Professor Francisco J. Esteban. 

For Victoria Lopez, this is a start “for future exchanges of degrees and other areas.” Dennis P. Wall said the agreement stems from the collaboration of the two research groups, over the course of two years of joint investigations, which led development of computational methods, “which help to detect the complex molecular alterations that occur in autism and its relationship to other autoimmune diseases, in order to identify new therapeutic targets.”

I recently gave a talk at the Autism Consortium Symposium held at Harvard Medical School on October 25 and attended by more than 600. In the talk I described my recent work on using artificial intelligence & machine learning to abbreviate the best-of-breed tools used for behavioral recognition of autism spectrum disorders. These approaches have helped me to identify a substantially shorter instrument that takes only minutes to complete but that achieves the same accuracy as the gold-standard tools. The Simons Foundation ran an article about the talk and the tools, that you can read here .

We have improved our short questionnaire for screening and diagnosis of autism, and through the help of over 2000 participants have measured it to be over 98% accurate. The questionnaire contains only 7 questions and takes minutes to complete, 93% shorter than the standard tool and over 2 hours faster. If you are a careprovider for someone with autism, you can contribute to our research by answering the questions in this questionnaire here.

We have 2 post doctoral positions open now to work on the genetics of autism and on understanding the clinical impact of human genomic variation. Please contact us if you are interested. Competitive salary, great working environment, and an opportunity to contribute to two major health challenges.