Growing up, Donna Werling often babysat her younger cousin who was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. This was in the early 2000s, and after a string of weekly therapy sessions, she began to see they weren’t really working. She realized that if this was the best doctors could do for her cousin, then they truly didn’t know enough about the nature of autism. Those insights marked a key turning point for Werling. She wanted to understand what autism does at a biological level and how the brain of an autistic person develops. That desire stayed with her throughout her college career and into a neuroscience Ph.D. program. In October 2019, Werling became an assistant professor with the Department of Genetics, where she studies sex differential biology in brain development and how genes affect autism risk.
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