Christine Ecker PhD

Dr. Christine Ecker is a Heisenberg Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and holds a visiting appointment at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Her primary research program focuses on the neurodevelopmental underpinnings of autism and the development of autism biomarkers. Dr. Ecker first became involved in autism research in 2006, and since then has been part of several large European research networks on autism that include the European Autism Interventions Program (EU-AIMS) and the Longitudinal European Autism Project (LEAP), where she heads the structural neuroimaging working group.

Dr. Ecker is also the Principal Investigator within the Autism Innovative Medicine Studies-2-Trials network (AIMS-2-TRIALS), which brings together 48 partners across 14 European countries to study how autism develops from preterm to adulthood, and how this varies across individuals. Within the network, Dr. Ecker is working together with a multidisciplinary team of experts (genetics, imaging, clinical research) to link autism to putative mechanisms. Her more recent work is directed towards examining autism within the general framework of neurodiversity and identifying biological mechanisms of resilience in the developing brain.