From helping to establish a popular undergraduate neuroscience major to attracting more than $120 million in research grants, the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research Center at the University of South Carolina has achieved notable success since its launch seven years ago.
And the momentum isn’t slowing. The center’s leadership has ambitious plans to serve more citizens of South Carolina.
One key area are the tests the center offers for the early detection of autism. Center director Jane Roberts, Carolina Distinguished Professor of psychology, wants to make the assessments more widely available.
“Our research programs for early detection of autism are effective, but our goal is to open a clinic to make our expertise available to the general public — not just those who meet the criteria for evaluation in our grant-funded projects,” says Roberts, who helped launched CAN in 2019 with biological sciences professor Jeff Twiss. The center has about 40 affiliated faculty members from nearly every college in the university.
“With a clinic, any parent could schedule a meeting for assessing their child and leave with a report from a licensed psychologist to get the services their child might need.”
Another area where Roberts is hoping to expand is on campus — focusing on degree-seeking USC students with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and learning disorders.
The initiative is called ASCEND@Carolina, which stands for Advocacy, Support and Community for Empowering Neurodivergence.
“In the general public, one in six individuals has a neurodevelopmental condition, and there are about 500 students with autism at USC,” Roberts says. “There likely are many more who are neurodivergent but unidentified. The ASCEND@Carolina program is for academically capable students who would benefit from academic, social, wellness and life-skills coaching specifically tailored for neurodivergent students.”
Such a support program would help improve graduation rates, degree completion timelines and employment outcomes for participating students, Roberts says.
Establishment of the clinic and ASCEND@Carolina are key priorities for the center in the future. But CAN already has numerous wins to its credit, including the launch of an undergraduate neuroscience major in 2022.
The academic program, which overlaps the fields of biological sciences and psychology,
now has more than 500 majors and many others who are earning minors. The major offers
three tracks: cognitive neuroscience, which focuses on memory, learning and decision
making; molecular and cellular neuroscience, which examines the roles of messenger
RNA and genetic coding; and autism and neurodevelopment, which offers an applied focus
on neurodevelopmental disorders.
“USC doesn’t yet have the reputation in autism research that, in my mind, it deserves.
But I think that’s beginning to change.”
“The thinking at first was that the neuroscience major might just divert students from psychology and biology, but those majors have continued to grow, as well,” Roberts says. “Almost 40 percent of the classes taught in the neuroscience major are taught by faculty associated with CAN.”
CAN’s establishment at USC in 2019 was partly the offshoot of another initiative Roberts and Twiss began two years earlier — the South Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Consortium — which includes faculty from USC, the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, Greenwood Genetics Center, Clemson University and Furman University.
The SCAND consortium has fostered research grant collaborations among the member institutions, internships for students and increased visibility for USC’s CAN, Roberts says. More than 160 attended the consortium’s annual conference in February, and more are expected for next year’s event, which will mark the consortium’s 10th anniversary.
“SCAND has invited speakers from across the country to its annual conferences, and that has promoted the research we’re doing here. USC doesn’t yet have the reputation in autism research that, in my mind, it deserves,” Roberts says. “But I think that’s beginning to change. I was at an international autism conference in Prague a few weeks ago, and two people from Yale told me they had heard we were doing great things at our Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research.”