Marjorie Solomon Friedman

Dr. Solomon is an associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She is on the faculty of the MIND Institute and of the postdoctoral Autism Research Training Program. She received a B.A. from Harvard College, an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1999. Dr. Solomon’s principal research program, which is funded by a Mentored Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, investigates the development of cognitive control, and other forms of higher cognition in high functioning individuals with autism spectrum disorders, and the relationship between cognitive control and behavioral symptoms including restricted and repetitive behaviors and formal thought disorder. As part of these efforts to link cognition with symptoms, she is working with Dr. Peter Mundy on an R-21 to examine the relationship between cognitive control and shared attention using virtual reality based social paradigms. She also is principal investigator on a grant funded by NARSAD (Mentors: Drs. Cameron Carter and Michael Frank) to study reinforcement learning in young adults with autism spectrum disorders using fMRI. Another research interest is gender differences in autism symptom expression, personality, psychopathology, and cognitive control which was funded by a Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Award (K12 HD051958; Mentor: Dr. Cameron Carter), and the role of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in autism symptoms (funded by a MIND Institute Pilot Research Grant).Education B.A., Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 1981 M.B.A., Business Administration, Stanford University, 1985 Ph.D., Social and Personality Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 1999