Kari Hanson

Kari Hanson is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Institute for Neural Computation at UCSD. Her research explores human brain evolution from the perspective of examining interspecific variation in neuroanatomy in extant humans and non-human primates on one hand, and intraspecific variation targeting extraordinary variations of the human mind from the perspective of neurodiversity in autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome on the other. Kari's ongoing projects in the Laboratory for Comparative Human Neuroanatomy (PI: Semendeferi) and Center for Human Brain Activity Mapping (PI: Halgren) include characterization of the molecular, cellular, and morphological brain phenotypes underlying Williams syndrome’s unique hypersociality, and applying machine learning-based approaches to parsing differences between (and genetic contributions to) morphology in human and chimpanzee brains.