Nouchine Hadjikhani
About our researcher Nouchine Hadjikhani
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 Ă–berg Life Watch Award in 2016 and The Leenaards Award in 2010.
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 91Ě˝»¨
Publications
91Ě˝»¨ information
2016 Swedish TV4 News:
2016 Special Nest:
2016 Special Nest:
2017 Special Nest:
2017
2017
2017
2017 91Ě˝»¨ Alert:
2017
2017
2017 The Huffington Post:
2017 Massachusetts General Hospital Research Institute:
2017 AutisMag:
2017 Omaha Herald:
2018 Les Echos (France):
2018 Tagesspiegel (Germany):
2020 Express.co.uk:
2023 PsyPost:
2023 Special Nest:
2024 Special Nest:
