Introducing Dr. Lucina Uddin

Dr. Lucina Uddin is one of CART’s newest faculty members. Fifteen years after receiving a Ph.D. from the UCLA Psychology Department, she returned to the campus this past fall. Dr. Uddin completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Child Study Center at New York University, then worked as a faculty member in Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at Stanford University. She next directed the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience program in the Psychology Department at the University of Miami until her recent move back to UCLA, where she currently directs the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Laboratory. Within a cognitive neuroscience framework, Dr. Uddin’s research combines analysis of structural and functional neuroimaging data to examine the organization of large-scale brain networks supporting executive functions and social cognition. Her current projects focus on understanding dynamic brain network interactions underlying cognitive inflexibility in autism spectrum disorder (read more here). She recently gave a keynote address at the annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research describing some of this research (read more here). One of her current projects seeks to understand the psychosocial impacts of the pandemic on children with autism (read more here). In another line of work, her lab investigates relationships between bilingualism, executive function, and the brain in autism (read more here).

Dr. Uddin is very involved with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives locally and internationally. She serves as the chair elect of the Diversity and Inclusivity Committee for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and is a member of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development justice, equity, diversity and inclusion taskforce and advisory council (ABC Study JEDI Task Force Workgroups). She looks forward to bringing this experience to help further ongoing initiatives at CART.