BSC Member - Jacob Michaelson, Ph.D.

Jacob Michaelson, Ph.D. is a Roy J. Carver Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and division director for Computational and Molecular Psychiatry at the University of Iowa. He and his team combine large-scale molecular data sets with machine learning to make predictions about how the brain is influenced by the genome. These approaches are applied mostly to neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism and language impairment. Dr. Michaelson leads a collaboration at the University of Iowa focused on learning more about the biological basis of twice-exceptionality (i.e., when a person has very high cognitive ability as well as a psychiatric or neurodevelopmental diagnosis such as autism). He also conducts collaborative research into the biological foundations of gender diversity. Dr. Michaelson is the Iowa site Principal Investigator for SPARK, the world's largest study of autism.