Sean Deoni
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Autism is a mysterious disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it affects one in every 150 American children and almost one in 94 boys.
Many know the physical behaviors associated with autism, such as the lack of eye contact, the jerky movements, the seeming disinterest in surroundings. But what exactly is going on in the child’s mind?
“At its extreme, it’s a child who doesn’t interact with the world and parents who blame themselves for it, and that in a sense can be heartbreaking,” said Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering. “To be able to contribute in some way to the understanding and hopefully to bridge that gap between what is going on and how to treat it would be hugely rewarding.”
Researchers have deployed an array of technologies to literally peer into the human mind and watch it work, much like looking under the hood of a car. At Brown, Deoni will focus on examining myelin, the fat layer that surrounds the neurons and essentially speeds the transmission of information from one part of the brain to another, much like insulation on a copper wire.
“Myelin is one of the most fundamental characteristics of human development,” Deoni said. “Without it, you don’t have effective communication, and you have a huge cognitive or functional deficit.”
To study myelin, Deoni uses a technique called multicomponent relaxometry. That device uses boxels (a three-dimensional picture from imaging) to compare the volume of water inside the myelin and outside the myelin. From that, scientists can deduce whether there’s enough myelin and whether the myelin is working as it should.
The benefits are huge. Deoni said the technique already has helped mental health specialists prescribe drugs to stop myelin loss or rebuild myelin in patients suffering from multiple sclerosis. “We can tell them when it can be used but also track its development,” he said.
Deoni, a 32-year-old Canadian, earned his Ph.D. in medical biophysics at the University of Western Ontario. He worked mostly on data sets, he said, surrounded by neuroscientists studying Parkinson’s disease.
“It became clear that what I was doing was directly applicable to what they were doing ... and that it would complement it,” he said.
So Deoni moved to England to study psychiatric disorders at Oxford University and King’s College London — studies he will now continue at Brown.