Early Detection Lab Team

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 ASD and infant screening and diagnosis. Since 2003, she has directed a prospective investigation that follows children at familial risk for ASD 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 ASD-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.

Monique Moore Hill, M.A., is a 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 disorders. 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.

Chandni Parikh, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She received her doctorate from the University of Arizona and is currently pursuing licensure as a clinical psychologist. She is currently the project manager of the Online Developmental Screening Study and is an examiner in the Early Detection Lab. She also sees clients for Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy at the UC Davis CAARE Center. Her research and clinical interests include understanding neurodevelopmental disorders in very young children with an emphasis on assessment, screening, diagnosis, and early identification of autism.

Soo Yeon Park, B.S., is a Research Data Analyst at the MIND Institute. She received a B.S. in statistics and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis combining her interest in statistical methods and the field of mental health. Soo serves multiple research teams and projects with various data-related tasks.

Erika Solis, B.S., is a project coordinator in the Early Detection Lab. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior with a minor in Psychology from the University of California, Davis. In 2011, she started as a research assistant driven by an interest in childhood mental, physical, and emotional development and well-being. As a staff research associate, her primary responsibilities include recruiting and enrolling study participants, conducting academic assessments of school-age children, and overseeing the collection, processing, and shipping of biospecimens. She is also the master coder for the Synchrony and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder Behavioral Coding Projects and has served as a co-leader for the MIND Institute's Social Skills Program.

Greg Young, Ph.D., is a research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Dr. Gregory Young is a developmental psychologist. He specializes in longitudinal research design and analysis, with an interest in eye-tracking and behavioral coding as ways to measure intra-individual change as it relates to typical development and the early onset of developmental disorders such as autism. He collaborates with many other researchers on studies of the onset and treatment of autism in infant siblings and young preschoolers. Dr. Young also has specific interests and expertise in statistical analysis techniques using hierarchical generalized models as applied to growth curve analysis, Rasch measurement modeling, and sequential analysis of time series data. Additionally, he has expertise in database programming and has designed and maintained legacy databases for the Baby Siblings Research Consortium as well as for many research laboratories at the MIND Institute.