Sarah Shultz, PhD

Sarah Shultz headshot

Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine

Sarah Shultz, PhD, received her doctorate in cognitive psychology from Yale University, where she used both behavioral and neuroimaging methods and analysis techniques (fMRI, EEG, dynamic causal modeling) to investigate social cognition and perception from infancy to adulthood in both typically developing populations and populations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

At Marcus Autism Center, Dr. Shultz codirects pediatric neuroimaging research. Her research aims to investigate the neural and behavioral origins of disrupted social engagement in individuals with autism to better understand the etiology of autism and to inform intervention.

She is the principal investigator on several National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded grants examining brain development in infants and children with and without developmental disabilities, including Marcus Autism Center’s Autism Center of Excellence grant, examining brain development from birth to 6 months in infants at high- and low-risk for autism.

Publications

  • Li, L., Bachevalier, J., Hu, X., Klin, A., Preuss, T.M., Shultz, S., & Jones, W. (2018). Topology of the structural social brain network in typical adults. Brain Connectivity, 9, 537-548.
  • Shultz, S., Klin, A., & Jones, W. (2018). Neonatal transitions in social behavior and their implications for autism. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 452-469.
  • Sifre, R., Olson, L., Gillespie, S., Klin, A., Jones, W., & Shultz, S. (2018). A longitudinal investigation of preferential attention to biological motion in 2- to 24-month-old infants. Scientific Reports, 1, 2527.
  • Klin, A., Shultz, S., Jones, W. (2015). Social visual engagement in infants and toddlers with autism: Early developmental transitions and a model of pathogenesis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 50 189-203.
  • Shultz, S., van den Honert, R.N., Engell, A.D., & McCarthy, G. (2014). Stimulus-induced reversal of information flow through a cortical network for animacy perception. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 129-135.
  • Shultz, S., Vouloumanos, A., Bennett, R.H., & Pelphrey, K. (2014). Neural specialization for speech in the first months of life. Developmental Science, 5, 766-774.
  • Shultz, S., & McCarthy, G. (2014). Perceived animacy influences the processing of human-like surface features in the fusiform gyrus. Neuropsychologia, 60, 115-120.

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