Affiliation: University of Reading, UK
Keywords: Empathy, Emotion, Social Behaviour, Autism, Individual Differences, Phenotype, Mobile health (mHealth) technologies
Full profile:
Bhismadev Chakrabarti is Professor of Neuroscience and Mental Health and Research Director of the Centre for Autism at the University of Reading, UK. After a first degree in Chemistry from the University of Delhi, he moved to the University of Cambridge. Here, he studied Neurobiology, and completed his doctoral and postdoctoral research on individual differences in emotion processing, for which was awarded the Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellowship. In 2009, he moved to set up his own research group within the newly formed Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics at the University of Reading. He has won multiple research grants from the Medical Research Council UK, and supervised over ten doctoral students. In 2015, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology in recognition of his achievements. He was elected to the Young Academy of Europe in 2019.
The fundamental arm of his research focuses on studying factors that influence the social-emotional phenotypic dimensions of human behaviour, which are often associated with difficulties in autistic individuals. His research uses multiple techniques that measure behaviour, autonomic, and neural activity (eye-tracking, psychophysics, facial EMG, EEG, and fMRI). In a parallel, applied arm of research, his lab has been working in India to build an autism research toolkit, through validating widely used screening and diagnostic tools, as well as cognitive measures linked to autism. His lab has used these tools to conduct the first systematic study of autism prevalence in Indian schoolchildren. He currently leads an international consortium that aims to develop a tablet-based platform for scalable neurodevelopmental phenotyping in low-resource settings.