Parent, partner and professional — the need to fulfill all of these roles at once complicates Vanessa Bal’s life.

At the Mouse Imaging Centre in Toronto, Jacob Ellegood and Jason Lerch are taking on autism’s complexity by scanning the brain of every autism mouse model they can acquire.

Brian O’Roak has helped to steer some of the largest, most complex studies of autism genetics to date.

André Fenton is teasing out the role of the brain’s memory hub in autism to better understand why affected individuals may have trouble adapting to changing circumstances.

Beth Stevens is unmasking new roles for microglia, the mysterious brain cells that seem to shape brain circuits.

Sergiu Pasca was among the first to model autism with neurons from affected individuals, a feat that could reveal the biochemical roots of some forms of autism.

Stephan Sanders has quickly climbed the ranks in autism research. At 35, he’s already credited with bringing a measure of clarity to autism genetics. And that’s just one feat in a long and accomplished resume.

British psychologist Uta Frith has singlehandedly transformed our understanding of autism. In partnership with her husband, neuroimaging expert Chris Frith, she helped launch the field of cognitive neuroscience and shaped a generation of scientists.

Tim Roberts knits together physics, medicine and technology to trace the origins of language processing problems in the brain, hoping to identify a telltale signature, or biomarker, for autism.

Elliott Sherr is unraveling the effects of genetics and brain structure in a handful of disparate disorders that each illuminates some aspect of autism.