Year: 2018

Giizhik, young artist with autism, featured on WPT’s ‘Wisconsin Life”

Wisconsin Public Television’s Wisconsin Life recently featured Klawiter, a young artist with autism, who for the past decade has been designing and selling holiday cards across Sawyer County, raising awareness for autism and more than $18,000 dollars for autism research at the Waisman Center. Diagnosed with autism at age five, Giizhik (whose name means “White …

Studying Alzheimer’s disease in individuals with Down syndrome

About once every year and a half, Erin Harvey takes time off of her job as a teacher’s aide and along with her mom, Nancy, makes a two and a half hour drive from her home in central Illinois to the University of Wisconsin–Madison Waisman Center to “embark on an afternoon of adventure.” At the …

Murray Brilliant, PhD – Slide of the Week

Defining the full spectrum of human disease associated with a biomarker is necessary to advance the biomarker into clinical practice. We hypothesize that associating biomarker measurements with EHR populations based on shared genetic architectures would establish the clinical epidemiology of the biomarker.

Scientists seek to improve quality control for genome editing therapies in the eye

Waisman Center investigator David Gamm, MD, PhD, and affiliate Krishanu Saha, PhD, are part of a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin- Madison who were recently granted a major award from the National Institute of Health’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium (SCGE). This award will support research focused on developing quality control methods …

Sriram Boothalingam, PhD – Slide of the Week

The auditory efferent system (ES) originates in the auditory cortex and terminates in the cochlea (inner ear). The activity of the ES has several hypothesized implications for human hearing: facilitating speech understanding in noisy environments, protecting the sensitive inner ear against loud noise, and serving as biological markers of damage in the auditory system.

Lauren Bishop-Fitzpatrick, PhD – Slide of the Week

As a large wave of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosed in the 1990s enters adulthood and middle age, knowledge about the patterning of lifetime health problems will become increasingly important for prevention efforts. We retrospectively analyzed diagnostic codes associated with de-identified electronic health records using a machine learning algorithm to characterize diagnostic patterns in decedents with ASD and matched decedent community controls.

Anita Bhattacharyya, PhD – Slide of the Week

Neuropathology of the Down syndrome cerebral cortex includes fewer interneurons in upper cortical layers.

Whirling the Waisman Way with Team Tristan

Picture a crisp October morning in Madison, Wisconsin – the bright colors of fall leaves, mists over the blue waters of Lake Mendota and – on one Sunday (the 14th this year) – a crowd of excited people waiting to run, walk or roll in the 2018 Waisman Whirl for ALL Abilities!

Barbara B. Bendlin, PhD – Slide of the Week

To test the hypothesis that cognitively unimpaired individuals with Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology differ from individuals with AD dementia on biomarkers of neurodegeneration, synaptic dysfunction, and glial activation.

Andrew Alexander, PhD – Slide of the Week

Title: Associations of prenatal maternal depression and anxiety symptoms with infant white matter microstructure Legend: Decreased frontal neurite density in the prefrontal white matter (blue highlighted regions) of 1-month old infants was associated with higher  prenatal maternal depression and anxiety.  Advanced diffusion MRI brain scans were performed on 101 infants at the Waisman Center for this …