Dr. Martha Herbert is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, a Pediatric Neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT-MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.  She is director of the TRANSCEND Research Program (Treatment Research and Neuroscience Evaluation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Dr. Herbert earned her medical degree at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.  Prior to her medical training she obtained a doctoral degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying evolution and development of learning processes in biology and culture in the History of Consciousness program, and then did postdoctoral work in the philosophy and history of science.  She trained in pediatrics at Cornell University Medical Center and in neurology and child neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she has remained.  She received the first Cure Autism Now Innovator Award and is now on the Scientific Advisory Committee of Autism Speaks.

Her main research interests are in addressing autism as a “dynamic encephalopathy” (something that can change) rather than a “static encephalopathy” (something that is fixed for life) and in how environmental vulnerability affects brain and body health.  Therefore she takes three approaches. 1) In her Whole-Baby Sibs study she is intensively investigating  the whole-body and brain function development in infants who are at high risk because they have an older sibling with autism as well as collecting samples from their mothers; 2) with TRANSCEND she is optimizing a set of brain measures sensitive to change in development, treatment and regression and to the brain tissue changes underlying differences in brain function; and 3) she is developing methods and collaborations for studying the systems biology of improvement and recovery.