Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, M.D.
Position: Scientific Advisory Board Member
Lonnie Zwaigenbaum is a professor and the director of autism research in the division of Developmental Pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. Zwaigenbaum completed his pediatric training at Queen’s University and his clinical fellowship in developmental pediatrics at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He completed a research fellowship and master’s degree in health research methodology at McMaster University.
Zwaigenbaum’s research focuses on early behavioral and biological markers, and early developmental trajectories in children with autism and related disorders. To identify early behavioral and neurobiological markers of autism, his research group is following a high-risk cohort, namely infant siblings of children with autism, in order to identify specific risk markers to aid in earlier diagnosis and study basic processes (e.g., attention, emotion, executive control) that may underlie later symptoms. He helped develop the Autism Observation Scale for Infants to aid in early detection and is a PI on the NextGen Siblings Project.