Natasha Marrus, MD, PhD

Washington University in St. Louis (WU)

My research focuses on the development of social motivation in infants and young children. Social motivation is the human predisposition to connect with others, and this disruption in this domain of function is hypothesized to underlie core symptoms in ASD. My work includes developing measures of social motivation to be applied in early childhood (with a focus on children at risk of ASD), using existing data to characterize early brain-behavior relationships underlying social motivation, and investigating the relationship between social motivation and other skills domains, such as language.