Autism Autonomy: In Search of Our Human Dignity

About Elizabeth B. Torres

Dr. Torres is a Computational Neuroscientist who has been working on theoretical and empirical aspects of sensory motor integration and human cognition since the late 90s. She graduated from Mathematics and Computer Science and spent a year at the NIH as a Pre-IRTA fellow applying her skill set to the medical field. This work led to Pre-doctoral-fellowship funding (5 years) of graduate school. During her PhD at UCSD she developed a new theoretical framework for the study of sensory motor integration employing elements of Differential (Riemannian) geometry and tensor calculus adapted from Contemporary Mechanics and Dynamics to the realm of Cognitive Neuroscience. Upon PhD completion she moved to CALTECH to receive postdoctoral training in electrophysiology and Computational Neural Systems as a Sloan-Swartz Fellow a Della Martin Fellow and a Neuroscience Scholar. In parallel she translated her models to work with humans suffering from pathologies of the nervous systems and built a new platform for personalized analyses of human naturalistic behaviors. She joined Rutgers University in 2008 and deployed her new platform to work on neurodevelopmental disorders with a focus on issues with social interactions. Under an NSF Cyber Enabled Discovery Award she then launched a transformative research program in autism seeking to build synergies with industry funded by the NSF Innovation Corps initiative. She filed four patent technologies and with the generous funding of the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation and the New Jersey Governors Council for the treatment and research of autism she extended the new platform to study natural dyadic and social behaviors in general. Her labs vision has paved the way to seek new frontiers in personalized mobile-Health dynamic diagnostics systems and new objectively-driven drug development for clinical trials. The overarching goal of her group is to create the means to quantify and track improvements in the persons quality of life. Photo credit - Roy Groething. Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e27da3rxnMg