Teresa Tavassoli

In 2007 I completed my psychology training in Germany at the University of Constance before finishing my Ph.D at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Following I have been working at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai at the Seaver Autism Center first as a postdoctoral fellow and since 2015 as an an Instructor. My research is dedicated to deepening our understanding of sensory reactivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its variation across the entire population. My goal is first to identify the most robust and objective ways to measure sensory reactivity, a new DSM-5 criterion, in children and adults with ASD, which can be used to guide diagnosis, guide sensory-based treatments and test treatment effects. My second goal is to elucidate underlying neural and genetic mechanisms of abnormal sensory reactivity in children with and without ASD.  Since 2016 I started working at the Centre for Research in Autism and Education (CRAE), UCL Institute of Education, to  join the DE-ENIGMA project; a multi-modal human-robot interaction for teaching and expanding social imagination in autistic children.