Early Detection Lab Team | UC Davis MIND Institute

Sally Ozonoff, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California Davis. She is a past Joint Editor of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research focuses on earliest manifestations of autism and infant screening and diagnosis. Since 2003, she has directed a prospective investigation that follows children at familial risk for autism from birth through adolescence. She and her team are also developing a video-based screening tool for autism in infancy. In a new project, she and colleagues in Engineering are exploring artificial intelligence approaches to detection of autism-relevant behaviors in video. She has published over 150 papers and three books on autism-related topics and her work on early diagnosis has appeared on the television show 60 Minutes.

Devon Gangi, Ph.D., is an assistant project scientist at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Miami. Her research focuses on understanding social and emotional development among infants at familial risk for autism and identifying early markers of autism. She is the project manager of the Tele-assessment of Development study and also an examiner in the Early Detection Lab .

Monique Moore Hill, M.A., is the Project Manager and behavioral examiner in the Early Detection Lab. She received her M.A. in Psychology from California State University, Sacramento and her B.A. in Psychology from San Francisco State University. Prior to joining the MIND Institute staff in 2007, she gained a diverse set of research and assessment skills working on studies of chronic disease self-management, depression, and women’s health. Her current research efforts are motivated by an interest in developmental processes and early detection of neurodevelopmental conditions. Monique’s role includes project oversight, personnel management, data management, and administering diagnostic assessments to infants, toddlers and school-age children.

Ana-Maria Iosif, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. Her primary methodological research interest lies in the analyses of data with complex structure, including repeated measures, longitudinal assessments with dropouts, and clustered data with informative cluster size. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on mental health, and she enjoys a very productive collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She became involved in autism research when joining the Infant Sibling Study team in 2009. Since then, she has provided statistical expertise and co-authored over 50 autism related publications utilizing behavioral and imaging data, including several reports from longitudinal studies of how the phenotype of autism develops and how it differs from developmental delay and typical development in children and adolescents.

Shyeena Maqbool, B.S., is a Lab Assistant in the Early Detection Lab. She began volunteering in the lab as an undergraduate research assistant due to her interest in child development. After completing a B.S. in psychology from UC Davis, she worked in a residential clinical treatment program with victims of trauma and CSEC youth. In 2019, she rejoined the Infant Sibling Lab as full-time staff. Shyeena’s duties include managing data collection and entry, coordinating visits, behavioral coding, supervising our team of research assistants and managing the lab’s administrative needs.

Rachel Ni, M.Sc., is the project coordinator for the Online Developmental Screening Study. She received her M.Sc. in Developmental Psychopathology from the University of Durham and her B.S. in Psychology from Drexel University. Prior to joining the lab, she worked in a diverse array of clinical settings at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her day-to-day tasks includes serving as the main liaison for families and our research study, recruitment, tracking and managing longitudinal data, coordinating visits, and developmental interviewing.