Dr. April Ann Benasich

Office Address: April Ann Benasich, Ph.D. CMBN, Rutgers University 197 University Ave. Newark, New Jersey 07102 Phone: (973) 353-1080, ext. 3204 Fax: (973) 353-1760 E-Mail: benasich@andromeda.rutgers.edu   Dr. Benasich is a tenured Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the Infancy Studies Laboratory at the Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN), Rutgers University, Newark. She is also the Director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research, one of the Carter Centers for Brain Research in Holoprosencephaly and Related Malformations. Dr. Benasich received her Ph.D. from New York University in Experimental and Clinical Psychology (1987). She also has a BSN in Nursing and fifteen years of medical experience including supervisor in Pediatrics and experience with high-risk infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Her research at NYU focused on early infant behaviors (i.e. attention, habituation, and memory) and their relation to later cognitive and linguistic competence. In collaboration with Dr. Marc H. Bornstein (now Chief, NICHD section on Child & Family Research, National Institutes of Health), she examined the reliability and stability of habituation of visual attention in infancy and its potential as a predictor of childhood cognitive development. As an Associate Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University (1986-1989) she served on the Research Steering Committee of a large national randomized clinical trial of an early intervention program for low birthweight infants. At this time, she also developed studies concerning infant and toddler sociobehavioral development and its relation with later behavior problems in childhood and adolescence. Several additional studies examined the effects of maternal knowledge and beliefs about infant development and child-rearing on both maternal and child outcomes. At the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN), Dr. Benasich's current research interests focus on perceptual-cognitive abilities (habituation, recognition memory, temporal processing) in high risk or neurologically impaired infants as predictors of later cognitive, linguistic, and behavioral outcomes. Her research program examines the impact of individual differences in early processing abilities, low birthweight, prematurity, and familial genetic contributions on developmental trajectories. All of the prospective, longitudinal research is conducted on infants from 4 through 84 months. At present, she is investigating auditory temporal processing in early infancy (shown to be a major predictor of language impairment and dyslexia in older children). The use of infant populations at risk for developmental delays, including infants with focal brain lesions due to prenatal stroke and very low birth-weight preterm infants who have sustained intraventricular hemorrhages, allows examination of patterns of behavioral deficit in conjunction with timing, extent, and location of brain lesion. Examination of auditory evoked potentials (EEG/ERPs), a new research initiative, provides converging noninvasive physiological measures to the current behavioral measures. In addition, Dr. Benasich is developing a prototype early assessment battery (including both behavioral and electrophysiological measures), based on previous work in her lab, that will allow evaluation of early cognitive and language development in nonverbal, motor impaired children with early (or genetic) brain insult. Dr. Benasich's basic research seeks to uncover the early neural mechanisms necessary for normal cognitive and language development and she is among the first to link deficits in infant temporal processing to later language and cognitive impairments.

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