Harvard launches new autism research center

Harvard University is launching a new center for autism research. The center, which will be housed at Harvard Medical School, will bring together experts all around the Harvard community, including the medical school’s affiliate hospitals, to better understand the basic mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorders. Two key areas of research focus for the new center will be how genetic and environmental factors come together to produce symptoms associated with autism and related disorders, as well as how the fundamental features of these disorders develop both within and outside the brain. The new center was established by a $20 million gift from philanthropists Lisa Yang and Hock Tan and will be named after them. Yang and Tan also helped set up a similar center at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research in 2017.