Göteborgs universitet
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About Nouchine Hadjikhani

Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School, where she directs the Neurolimbic Research Laboratory, and Professor in Experimental Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Sahlgrenska Academy, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She is also an Assistant in Radiology at Mass General Hospital in Boston. She is an author of more than 145 peer-review articles and 16 books, book chapters and other publications, and is highly cited, with an h-index of 63 and more than 19,000 citations as of April 2024.

In her work, she has employed neuroanatomy, histology, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) as well as behavioral methods, including eye-tracking, to study the normal and the diseased brain.

For her outstanding research in the field of autism she received Niclas Öberg Life Watch Award in 2016 and The Leenaards Award in 2010.

 

Nouchine Hadjikhani
Nouchine Hadjikhani

Research interests

Early in her career study, Nouchine Hadjikhani discovered and characterized the area of the brain that is responsible for color vision with use of fMRI. She then showed that the aura of migraine was a phenomenon similar to cortical spreading depression, in was a ground-breaking paper that has been cited more than 1700 times, and she has since been studying the long-term effects of migraine on the brain.

In the field of autism, she demonstrated that "low level" visual processing is normal in individuals with autism, ruling out a bottom-up deficit, and was also the first to provide data disproving a popular theory stating that individuals with autism are lacking the brain area devoted to face identification (the “fusiform face area”, or FFA).

Her current work is dedicated to understanding the neural bases of the deficits of social instinct in ASD, and to develop neural biomarkers that will help to objectify the effect of therapeutic approaches, both behavioral and pharmacological. Recently, she demonstrated that affective empathy is preserved in individuals with autism. In her current research she is trying to understand the roots of eye-contact difficulties in autism, and how to improve them.

Funding

Nouchine has received the following funding for her research

  • VR
  • University of Gothenburg

 

Contact information

Nouchine in the media

2016  Swedish TV4 News: Hennes forskning kan lösa autismens gåtor

2016  Special Nest: Urindrivande läkemedel för behandling av autism?

2016 Special Nest:  Pris för autismforskning

2017 Special Nest:  Ny forskning: Autism kan bero på annorlunda hjärnaktivitet

2017  The Philadelphia Enquirer:  Study: Overstimulation, not indifference, makes eye contact hard for people with autism

2017  Science Daily: Why do those with autism avoid eye contact.

2017  MedicalXpress:  Researchers explore why those with autism avoid eye contact

2017   Science Alert: For Those With Autism, Eye Contact Isn’t Just Weird, It’s Distressing

2017   Harvard Medical School News: Ocular Overdrive

2017   The Mass General Research Institute Blog:  More Than Meets the Eye: Researchers Find Eye Contact Causes Stress and Overactivation in the Brains of Autistic Individuals

2017  The Huffington Post:  Why Eye Contact Is So Distressing For People With Autism

2017  Massachusetts General Hospital Research Institute:  Brain imaging studies provide new insights into biological basis of behaviors in schizophrenia and autism

2017  AutisMag: Can Your Child’s Eye Movement Help You Visualize their Future Well-Being?

2017   Omaha Herald:  Cooking up just the right scare

2018 Les Echos (France):  Vers un premier traitement contre l’autisme?

2018   Tagesspiegel (Germany): Fatal Giant Waves in the head

2020   Express.co.uk:  Autism symptoms: Study delves into why lack of eye contact is often a symptom of condition

2023   PsyPost: Eye contact avoidance in autism may stem from abnormal sensitivity of brain’s threat processing system, study suggests.

2023  Special Nest: ”För autistiska personer är ögonkontakt näst intill smärtsamt”

2024  Special Nest: Forskning om läkemedlet Bumetanide som behandling vid autism