Meghan Swanson
University of Minnesota, MN·Psychology
The first years of life shape how the brain develops language, thinking and social skills. Early differences can signal later challenges.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
autism spectrum disorder
infant siblings
language development
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Test whether infants with asymptomatic congenital CMV have less organized brain white matter than control infants from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, using multi-shell diffusion MRI.
- Compare cognitive, language, motor, executive function and emotion-regulation scores over time between screening-identified asymptomatic cCMV infants and control infants.
- Explore whether diffusion MRI and functional MRI during passive listening can predict later sensorineural hearing loss in infants with asymptomatic cCMV.
- Build a normative model of vocabulary growth from MacArthur-Bates CDI data in the Baby Sibling Research Consortium database to flag likely late talkers among siblings of autistic children.
- Test whether infant vocalizations, measured from day-long home audio recordings at 6 and 12 months, predict later autism diagnosis and language and social communication scores.
- Determine whether caregiver speech features such as word variety and responsiveness relate to infant communication and to prefrontal and temporal brain development measured by diffusion MRI.
More about the research
The three projects here follow infants whose development may be at risk, either because they have a congenital virus infection or because an older sibling has autism. The goal is to find early brain and behavior markers that could guide screening and intervention, using brain MRI, standardized development tests, and recordings of how babies and caregivers talk.
Why it matters
Families of babies with congenital CMV could benefit from better evidence for screening, monitoring and antiviral treatment guidelines, including earlier prediction of hearing loss. For infants with autistic siblings, better ways to flag late talkers and caregiver-based targets could support earlier, parent-delivered interventions during the birth-to-three period, when gains in language are largest.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Neurodevelopmental Outcomes for CMV Infections Identified by Newborn Screening
NIH · Aug 2025 – Jul 2030
Predicting Late Talkers in Infants who are at Elevated Familial Likelihood for Autism
NIH · Aug 2025 – Jul 2027
Caregiver Speech and Brain-Behavior Development in Infants At-Risk for ASD
NIH · May 2022 – Apr 2027
Closest labs
Ruth Carper
San Diego State University, CA·Neuroscience
Track changes in brain anatomy, function and connectivity in autistic and typical adults aged 40–70 using multimodal MRI, and relate them to motor, executive and emotional changes.
Ece Demir-Lira
University of Iowa, IA·Psychology
Test a serial mediation model in which gestational age at birth affects children's number skills through their verbal skills and then through the brain systems for numbers, measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Rachel Lean
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether maternal mind-mindedness, a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states, predicts later parenting sensitivity, using prospective observations of mother-infant interactions from birth to age 3.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.