Meet Our Team | Wilkinson Lab Research | Boston Children's Hospital

Principal Investigator

Carol Wilkinson, MD, PhD

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Carol L. Wilkinson is a physician-scientist in the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. She earned her MD, PhD, and completed her pediatric residency at the University of California, San Francisco. At UCSF, her graduate work in Steven Finkbeiner’s lab focused on molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity. She completed her clinical fellowship in developmental behavioral pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2017, and continued her postdoctoral training with Charles Nelson in the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience. As a Developmental Behavioral Pediatrician in the Autism Spectrum Center and Developmental Medicine Center at Boston Children’s, she cares for children with a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders and challenges. Through her research and clinical work, her goal is to help children maximize their potential in all aspects of their life.

Staff Members

	Celia Constantino Celia joined the Baby Steps team after graduating from Tulane University in 2021 with a B.S. in Public Health and a minor in Spanish. She is especially interested in neuroplasticity in early childhood and in creating paths toward equitable access to preventative healthcare services for marginalized communities. Following her experiences studying health disparities in the Americas and providing support to children and families in crisis, Celia hopes to focus her career on protecting the health and rights of migrant families. She is thrilled to be a part of the Wilkinson and Nelson Labs and to contribute to research aimed at strengthening the integration of mental healthcare in the primary care setting throughout childhood.
	Amy Dave Amy joined the Baby Steps team in the summer of 2022 as a research assistant after graduating with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a concentration in biomaterials and tissue engineering. During her undergrad, she worked with Dr. Wilkinson on the ISP2 project primarily hand-editing EEG data and performing data analysis in Python notebooks. In the Baby Steps project, she will assist in behavioral and electrophysiological studies of infants and toddlers with and without autism spectrum disorder. Amy aims to pursue an M.D. path with a focus on neurology and pediatrics. In her free time, Amy enjoys tumbling just to make sure she can still do a backflip.
	Brianna Francis Brianna joined Dr. Wilkinson and Dr. Nelson’s lab in the fall of 2021 as a Research Coordinator for the Baby Steps project, which uses EEG to predict ASD and other developmental outcomes in the first year of life. She received her BS in Neuroscience at Quinnipiac University in 2016 and her MA in Applied Developmental Psychology from George Mason University in 2020. After receiving her BS, Brianna worked at the Yale Child Study Center on multiple projects examining the neural mechanisms of pregnancy and parenting with a substance using population. Brianna is thrilled to be part of the Baby Steps team and to contribute to the field of ASD research. Outside of the lab, Brianna loves reading, hiking, and hanging out with her cat.
	McKena Geiger McKena joined Dr. Wilkinson’s lab in the summer of 2021 as Clinical Research Assistant II. In 2019 she received a B.S. in Psychology with minors in Chemistry and Zoology from North Dakota State University. That year, she joined the lab of Dr. Emily Kappenman at San Diego State University, examining the interactions between attention and emotion using ERP techniques. Currently, McKena works on Dr. Wilkinson’s BRIDGE and FRAXA studies, using EEG and behavioral assessments to help answer questions related to language acquisition in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Having a long-standing interest in computational methodology, she hopes to one day contribute to our understanding of the developing brain as a Computational Cognitive Neurosciencentist. In her free time, McKena enjoys playing piano and eating food prepared by someone else.
	Sophie Hurewitz Sophie joined Dr. Wilkinson's lab and the Down Syndrome Program after graduating from Duke University in 2022 with a B.A. in Neuroscience, a minor in Global Health, and a certificate in Child Policy Research. She is especially interested in neurodevelopmental diagnoses and the impacts of social determinants of health in early childhood, ensuring equitable access to pediatric developmental and behavioral health services, and improving systems of support for caregivers and families. Sophie was a Co-PI on a recent study examining the barriers and facilitators to early childhood autism diagnoses among Black and Latinx children in North Carolina and was the first undergraduate trainee to participate in the North Carolina Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) program. She is excited to continue pursuing her interests in clinical medicine, health policy, health services research, family advocacy, and child development at Boston Children's. In her free time, Sophie enjoys reading, discovering new restaurants, exploring farmers' markets, and practicing yoga.
	Alex Job Said Alex was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received his B.Sc in Neuroscience from The George Washington University in 2021. During his undergraduate years, Alex worked as the lab manager of the Lab of Autism and Developmental Neuroscience, focusing on several brain and behavioral-based characteristics of ASD and BAP. More recently, Alex expanded his work into potential links between white matter lesions, autistic traits, and aging. Alex is excited to continue to develop his research knowledge and experience within the field of ASD, here in the Wilkinson and Nelson Labs. He is particularly interested in understanding early brain-based autistic traits through the use of imaging tools and analysis. For the long-term, Alex aims to pursue a M.D. path, and continue to focus on ASD. Outside of research, Alex loves horseback riding, soccer and hiking. He is also decent at cooking, excelling only in Brazilian “churrasco” (BBQ).

Postdoctoral and Clinical Fellows

	Wenkang 'Winko' An, PhD I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021, under the supervision of Prof. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham. My dissertation work sought to study the neural representation of human auditory attention. Specifically, I decoded attentional control from multimodal neuroimaging measures (EEG and fMRI) and fused the information in these modalities through a representational similarity analysis framework. In addition, I designed multiple auditory brain-computer interface paradigms, in which I decoded attention from single-trial EEG signals using machine learning. I joined the Nelson and Wilkinson Labs in 2021 as a Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center Postdoctoral Fellow. My goals here are to understand the neural mechanism underlying impaired abilities in patients with a rare genetic condition, and build computational models that can reliably predict autism and developmental outcomes from EEG.
	Haerin Chung, PhD Haerin received her PhD. from University of Chicago in 2022, where she was a member of the Infant Learning and Development Laboratory at the Center for Early Childhood Research. At UChicago, her graduate work in Amanda Woodward’s lab focused on the link between infants' experience and perception of actions. She investigated the neural correlates that underlie infants’ perception of actions that are associated with infants' experience using an integration of EEG and behavioral methods. Here at the LCN, Haerin seeks to explore the developmental changes in EEG measures, including the trajectory of functional connectivity, of those with, without, and at-risk for autism. Haerin is also interested in understanding how early indices of EEG are associated with different social-cognitive outcomes later in development.
	Caitlin Clements, PhD Caitlin completed her bachelor’s degree at Yale and her PhD in clinical psychology (child track) at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a Fulbright grant as a visiting doctoral student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and did her clinical internship at SUNY Upstate Medical University. Caitlin has interests in the development of reward processing, autism spectrum disorder, and rare genetic disorders, and uses a variety of methods including EEG. She is currently a fellow in the T32 Translational Post-doctoral Training in Neurodevelopment program. She also conducts research in the Nelson lab, and is a clinician in the Faja Lab on the IDEA and ABC-CT studies.
	Kristina “Kristy” Teresa Johnson, PhD Kristy received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2021, where she was a member of the Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Lab. Her research focuses on improving the lives of individuals with complex neurodevelopmental differences, especially those with few spoken words, rare genetic disorders, intellectual disabilities, and/or profound autism. Specifically, she examines how genetic alterations in the brain affect cognitive, emotional, and communicative development, and she seeks biomarkers that can sensitively track that development over time. She also creates augmentative and adaptive technology to capture data in the real world and specializes in personalized naturalistic studies. She is currently a Rosamund Stone Zander Translational Neuroscience Center postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital.
	Lisa Yankowitz, PhD I received my PhD in Psychology with Clinical Training from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, working under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Schultz. My doctoral research had two arms. In the first, I investigated structural brain differences associated with autism, and applied newly-developed methods to examine the nature of structural differences. The second arm of my research examined infant vocalizations (e.g., crying, babbling, laughing) in infants at high risk for autism. I identified features of vocalizations which differ in the first year of life in autism, and associated these with functional connectivity (as measured by fMRI). I completed my predoctoral clinical internship at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. I was thrilled to join the LCN in 2020 as a Clinical-Research Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital. Here, I work in the Wilkinson and Nelson labs, and am interested in identifying early predictors of autism using EEG and behavioral measures.