Dr. James Booth is a Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Educational Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Booth’s research examines brain mechanisms behind the development of language, reading, and mathematics in typical and atypical populations. We are excited to have Dr. Booth speak about his work on neuroimaging related to individual and developmental differences in mathematics.

This seminar will begin with an outline of a neuro-cognitive model of math processing that includes both verbal and spatial components. Our neuroimaging work shows that reliance on these components changes developmentally when solving arithmetic problems, suggesting increases in specialization. Our individual differences work further suggests that increases in working memory and precision of the mental number line are tightly related to these developmental changes in reliance on the verbal and spatial components. However, the reliance on these components during arithmetic appears to also depend on environmental variables, such as the culture that one grows up in and also one’s socio-economic status. Our research reveals a complex pattern in which the components of the neuro-cognitive network engaged depends on the nature of the task, the age and ability of the child, and the environment in which the child grows up.

Dr. Seth King is an Assistant Professor in Special Education within the College of Education at the University of Iowa. Dr. King’s research focuses on applied behavioral analysis and special education. We look forward to Dr. King’s presentation on crossovers between special education, applied behavior analysis, gifted education, and neuroscience.

Twice exceptional children nominally receive services from professionals associated with special education. However, services associated with areas in which children demonstrate accelerated ability are rarely coordinated with supports administered through formal individualized education programs. This presentation describes the benefits of coordinated services for twice exceptional children and provides suggestions for future research and practice.

Dorit Kliemann studied Psychology at the University of Bremen in Germany. During her doctoral studies at the Freie Universitaet Berlin she started to study the neurobiological basis of social cognition in ASD with behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Dr. Kliemann continued to investigate the social brain with an emphasis on atypical social information processing in ASD using advanced imaging methods during her postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before starting her own lab at the University of Iowa, Dr. Kliemann focused on functional brain networks in Autism and brain lesions patients at the California Institute of Technology. At the University of Iowa, the Kliemann Lab studies how the brain compensates and re-organizes. How does variation in brain structure and function lead to intact or impaired social cognition? How can insights from neuroimaging be used to better understand the psychological mechanisms? Her lab uses a multimodal approach (including behavioral, eye-tracking, lesion studies, structural and functional MRI) to study brain-cognition-behavior relations that ultimately produce complex social cognition.

Networks defined by correlations in brain activity (“functional connectivity”) characterize how different brain regions communicate with one another and underlie our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. How do these functional networks produce impaired cognition and behavior — or compensate for it — in individuals with psychiatric conditions, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder? In this talk I will discuss challenges in studying the neurobiological basis of social difficulties in ASD. I will outline our approach to overcome these challenges and showcase preliminary results from an ongoing collaborative study on functional connectivity in ASD.

Sally M. Reis holds the Letitia Neag Chair in Educational Psychology, is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, and the former Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the Neag School of Education at University of Connecticut. She was a classroom teacher in public education as well as an administrator before her work at UConn. She has authored and co-authored more than 270 articles, books, book chapters, monographs and technical reports, and worked in a research team that has generated over 100 million dollars in grants in the last 15 years. Her scholarship is diverse and broad, as summarized by her numerous articles, books, book chapters, monographs, and technical reports. Her specialized research interests are related to diverse populations of gifted and talented students, including students with learning disabilities, gifted females, and culturally and linguistically diverse talented students.

She is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Association for Gifted Children and a fellow of Division 15 of The American Psychological Association. Her research interests are related to gifted education and talent development, as well as special populations of gifted and talented students, including: students with learning disabilities, gifted girls and women, and diverse groups of talented students who are often underserved. Among her proudest accomplishments, besides her family, is her work on the Schoolwide Enrichment Model and her leadership of Confratute, with her partner and husband, Joseph Renzulli for over four decades.

This keynote will provide an overview of exciting and positive new research about students who are both academically talented and have disabilities, focusing on recent research on students with ASD. The focus of this work is how we can use strengths and interests to help develop talents in a broad range of students who are 2e, that is twice exceptional. Specific recent research results will be shared about how we can support the academic strengths and interests of this group of students and help them realize their potential.

Dr. Marjorie Solomon is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California-Davis, and a faculty of the UC Davis MIND Institute and the Imaging Research Center. Dr. Solomon’s laboratory studies cognitive development in autistic children, adolescents, and young adults, and especially those with intellectual abilities in the average or better range. Her work utilizes neuropsychological and cognitive neuroscience methods including fMRI. We look forward to having Dr. Solomon present an overview of work that highlights the unique cognitive and other strengths found in persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders display a unique set of strengths and challenges. In this talk, I will highlight recent behavioral and neuroimaging work from my laboratory that examines higher cognition (cognitive control and memory) in autistic persons with average or better levels of intellectual functioning. These studies illustrate that autistic individuals often perform comparably to neurotypical controls when engaging in tasks assessing higher cognition, that they utilize different strategies for task completion, and that their unique style can confer both benefits and challenges for functioning. I will conclude with a discussion of how this information processing style may impact their functioning in the work world when they are young adults.

Hanna Stevens is the Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and runs the Psychiatry and Early Neurobiological Development Lab (PENDL) at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Her research seeks to understand molecular and cellular aspects of early brain development and their relevance to psychiatric disorders. Her work is particularly focused on understanding how prenatal stress, environmental exposures and genes that play a role in early development have an impact on childhood behavior and act as risk factors for multiple psychiatric disorders. The goal of her lab is to advance mental health diagnosis and treatment of disorders across the lifespan, particularly focusing on the high-risk times of pregnancy and early development.

Neuroscientific advances have revealed multiple connections between the striatum and neurodevelopmental disabilities. Here, I will discuss studies from my lab that implicate early striatal growth with autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I will also highlight the importance of personal insights into ability and disability of those who do work in this field and make the case for mentoring individuals from twice-exceptional backgrounds for the sake of reaching new research horizons.

Dr. Lane Strathearn is a Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Neuroscience and Pharmacology, at the University of Iowa. He is also the Director of the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, and Physician Director of the Center for Disabilities and Development (CDD). His research focuses on the neurobiology of mother-infant attachment, including longitudinal studies of parents and infants, examining maternal brain and oxytocin responses to infant face and cry cues, using functional MRI and behavioral observation. As co-director of the new Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), he is also interested in developmental, behavioral and epigenetic risk markers for autism.

Although the etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been strongly linked to genetic factors, early social experience may also contribute to its development, potentially via epigenetic mechanisms. Oxytocin and its receptor OXTR are epigenetically altered by early social experience, play crucial roles in mammalian social and cognitive development, and are associated with both genetic and epigenetic risk for autism. Our lab's goal is to discover modifiable pathways for intervention in children at risk for autism, by measuring how social experience is correlated with epigenetic change in autism.

Dr. Gregory L. Wallace is an Associate Professor at The George Washington University. His research focuses on neuropsychological (e.g., executive function) and brain (e.g., cortical structural) development in autism spectrum disorder and other neurodevelopmental disorders across the lifespan and their impacts on real-world outcomes. He is also particularly interested in eating-related behaviors and their cognitive and neural correlates in autism spectrum disorder and other populations. Finally, Dr. Wallace has a strong interest in better understanding and elucidating behavioral and cognitive strengths in autism spectrum disorder, including savant skills. He has published and presented widely on these and related topics.

Autism, from its earliest descriptions (Kanner, 1943; Asperger, 1944), has been linked with surprising skills and exceptional abilities - ranging from intra-individual strengths, such as noticing tiny changes in the environment or facility with jigsaw puzzles, to prodigious strengths in domains such as art, music, memory, and calendar calculation (Treffert, 2006). Although not all people with autism exhibit these talents, there is a clear over-representation of these abilities in autism compared to other neurodevelopmental conditions – for example, Howlin et al. (2009) found that 30% of autistic adults had special abilities. This talk will review evidence linking autism (at both clinical and subclinical levels) and talent and how this association might inform twice-exceptionality.

Jason Wolff is a McKnight Presidential Fellow, an Associate Professor, and the Autism Spectrum Disorder certificate coordinator at the University of Minnesota. His work is focused upon the intersection of brain, behavior, and intervention as it pertains to sensorimotor development and restricted and repetitive behaviors in the first years of life. His current goals for his lab, funded in-part by the National Institute of Mental Health, are to leverage behavioral and brain imaging data to characterize factors associated with the early emergence of core features of autism. The ultimate goal of this work is to inform novel approaches to very early intervention.

Restricted and repetitive behaviors and differences in sensory responsivity are defining features of autism. However, we know very little about how these develop, in terms of both brain and behavior, in babies and toddlers who are later diagnosed. In this presentation, I will describe what we have learned about these aspects of autism in the first years of life and discuss the implications of “experiencing the world differently” on development through early childhood and beyond.

Edwin G. (Ted) Abel, Ph.D. is the founding director of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute, an interdisciplinary center at the University of Iowa focused on the causes, treatments, and prevention of diseases that affect the brain and nervous system. He serves as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology in the Carver College of Medicine. Dr. Abel is recognized as a pioneer in defining the molecular mechanisms of long-term memory storage, and identifying how these processes go awry in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Ted will discuss his recent work on the molecular mechanisms underlying memory storage, with a focus on how our knowledge of neuroscience can help us identify molecular and cellular approaches to enhance cognition.

Dr. Jake Michaelson is a Roy J. Carver associate professor in psychiatry and neuroscience and the division director of computational and molecular psychiatry at the University of Iowa. His lab uses advanced computational approaches to study the effect of genetic variations on the development of the brain, with specific applications in autism and language impairment. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in biological engineering at Utah State University before earning his PhD in computational biology at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany in 2010. After his time in Germany, he joined the lab of psychiatric geneticist Jonathan Sebat at UC San Diego, where he completed his postdoctoral training and published several of the earliest papers dealing with whole genome sequencing in autism. In 2013 he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, and his current research is supported by NIMH, NIDCD, the Simons Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

While intelligence has been demonstrated as one of the most heritable traits in the general population, less is understood about the genetics of high cognitive ability when it co-occurs with a neurodevelopmental condition. We recruited over 1,500 high-ability families with autism to take online self- and parent-report surveys covering ability, creativity, and indices of mental illness. We then compared genetic profiles of these families to their scores on these surveys to uncover relationships between brain development, cognition, and creativity.

Dr. Thomas Nickl-Jockschat’s research focuses on genetic variation associated with neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders and their impact on brain structure and function. Consequently, his lab uses translational approaches, including neuroimaging, in humans and animals to identify neuroanatomical and functional changes and their molecular underpinnings. A special focus lies upon the joint analysis of gene expression patterns and whole-brain neuroimaging findings in rodents and humans.

Brain maturation requires precisely honed growth patterns of different cerebral regions. Disrupted growth trajectories of a set of distinct brain regions, including neural hubs required for the processing of rewards and faces, might be a core mechanism underlying autism. This talk will give an overview over evidence for altered brain growth trajectories in autism and their potential relevance for changes in brain function.

Susan G. Assouline, professor of school psychology and director of the Belin-Blank Center, holds the Myron and Jacqueline N. Blank Endowed Chair in Gifted Education. Dr. Assouline collaborates with Dr. Megan Foley Nicpon and Dr. Alissa Doobay on the center’s twice-exceptional research agenda, conducted through the center’s Assessment and Counseling clinic. The twice-exceptional research started in 2005 with a three-year Javits Grant awarded to investigate the characteristics of twice-exceptional students. With Drs. Nicholas Colangelo and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik, she co-developed the Iowa Acceleration Scale, a tool designed to guide educators and parents through decisions about grade-skipping students. In 2015, she co-edited with Nicholas Colangelo, Joyce VanTassel-Baska, and Ann Lupkowski-Shoplik, A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students. She received the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) 2016 Distinguished Scholar Award, the 2018 University of Iowa Award for Faculty Excellence, the 2019 University of Iowa Leadership in Research Award, and in 2019 was inducted into the 2E Hall of Fame.

Through the decades of research conducted by professionals at the Belin-Blank Center, findings have consistently demonstrated the importance of understanding both the strengths and the difficulties that co-occur for twice-exceptional students. Dr. Assouline will share the history and progression of research on twice-exceptionality at the Belin-Blank Center, including novel findings that have dispelled myths regarding twice-exceptionality. Dr. LeBeau will elaborate on the makeup of the current dataset, and share his investigations related to early development of high-ability and twice-exceptional students. Dr. Schabilion will explore the relative strengths and weaknesses among twice-exceptional students with a specific learning disability in writing.

Brandon LeBeau is an Assistant Professor of Educational Measurement and Statistics at the University of Iowa. His work promotes strong statistical practice through the evaluation of statistical methodology and development of statistical research software. He also performs quantitative program evaluation, with a focus on evaluating programs for high-achieving students.

Through the decades of research conducted by professionals at the Belin-Blank Center, findings have consistently demonstrated the importance of understanding both the strengths and the difficulties that co-occur for twice-exceptional students. Dr. Assouline will share the history and progression of research on twice-exceptionality at the Belin-Blank Center, including novel findings that have dispelled myths regarding twice-exceptionality. Dr. LeBeau will elaborate on the makeup of the current dataset, and share his investigations related to early development of high-ability and twice-exceptional students. Dr. Schabilion will explore the relative strengths and weaknesses among twice-exceptional students with a specific learning disability in writing.

Dr. Katie Schabilion is a postdoctoral scholar at the Belin-Blank Center Assessment and Counseling Clinic and a graduate of the University of Iowa School Psychology program. Dr. Schabilion's clinical interests include assessment of high-ability and twice-exceptional students and advocacy for appropriate identification and services for these students in schools. Dr. Schabilion’s dissertation considered the cognitive and psychosocial variables related to a diagnosis of Specific Learning Disorder with impairment in written expression.

Through the decades of research conducted by professionals at the Belin-Blank Center, findings have consistently demonstrated the importance of understanding both the strengths and the difficulties that co-occur for twice-exceptional students. Dr. Assouline will share the history and progression of research on twice-exceptionality at the Belin-Blank Center, including novel findings that have dispelled myths regarding twice-exceptionality. Dr. LeBeau will elaborate on the makeup of the current dataset, and share his investigations related to early development of high-ability and twice-exceptional students. Dr. Schabilion will explore the relative strengths and weaknesses among twice-exceptional students with a specific learning disability in writing.

Dr. Alissa Doobay received her PhD in Counseling Psychology from The University of Iowa in 2010. She is currently a Licensed Psychologist and Supervisor of Psychological Services at the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at The University of Iowa where she provides clinical assessment, therapy, and consultation services. Her clinical expertise is in the area of twice-exceptionality, particularly students who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Learning Disorders, ADHD, anxiety, and mood disorders. In addition to direct clinical service, Dr. Doobay provides training and clinical supervision to doctoral and postdoctoral trainees at the Belin-Blank Center; engages in outreach to healthcare providers, teachers, and parents on the topic of twice-exceptionality; is a member of the University of Iowa Autism Spectrum Disorder Committee; and conducts research on twice-exceptionality. Currently, Dr. Doobay is involved in a collaborative research project between the Belin-Blank Center and the UI Neuroscience Institute investigating the Neuroscience of Twice-Exceptionality.

Conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the high ability population is a complex and nuanced practice that should be grounded in scientific knowledge. Yet there is limited empirical research on which to base clinical decisions for this population. At the Belin-Blank Center Assessment and Counseling Clinic, we are expanding our understanding of the neuroscience of twice-exceptionality through collaboration between clinicians and researchers. In this presentation, we will include a brief overview of the existing literature on ASD among high ability youth, describe the clinical processes to understand and differentially diagnose ASD among this population, and outline methods we are employing to bridge research and clinical work in novel and meaningful ways.

Megan Foley-Nicpon is a professor in Counseling Psychology and Department Executive Officer for Psychological and Quantitative Foundations at the University of Iowa. She also serves as the Associate Director for Research and Clinic at the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development. Dr. Foley-Nicpon is a licensed psychologist whose research and clinical interests include assessment and intervention with high ability students with disabilities, and the social and emotional development of talented and diverse students. She regularly writes and presents about high ability, counseling psychology, and twice-exceptionality.

Conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the high ability population is a complex and nuanced practice that should be grounded in scientific knowledge. Yet there is limited empirical research on which to base clinical decisions for this population. At the Belin-Blank Center Assessment and Counseling Clinic, we are expanding our understanding of the neuroscience of twice-exceptionality through collaboration between clinicians and researchers. In this presentation, we will include a brief overview of the existing literature on ASD among high ability youth, describe the clinical processes to understand and differentially diagnose ASD among this population, and outline methods we are employing to bridge research and clinical work in novel and meaningful ways.

Duhita Mahatmya, Ph.D., is currently an Assistant Research Scientist in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. As a research methodologist, Dr. Mahatmya provides conceptual and analytical support to projects that examine equity issues in K-12 and higher education. Her research interests focus on examining how family, school, and community environments shape the attainment of developmental milestones from early childhood to young adulthood.

Conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the high ability population is a complex and nuanced practice that should be grounded in scientific knowledge. Yet there is limited empirical research on which to base clinical decisions for this population. At the Belin-Blank Center Assessment and Counseling Clinic, we are expanding our understanding of the neuroscience of twice-exceptionality through collaboration between clinicians and researchers. In this presentation, we will include a brief overview of the existing literature on ASD among high ability youth, describe the clinical processes to understand and differentially diagnose ASD among this population, and outline methods we are employing to bridge research and clinical work in novel and meaningful ways.