Ellie Gabriel, Davenport '22
In the Eye of the Beholder
By Lena Chan
Social interaction does not come easily to Ellie Gabriel’s brother. Like many with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), he struggles to read voice inflections, sustain eye contact, and recognize the emotional states of others. Yet from the moment her brother was born, Ellie understood and loved him for his differences. She quickly grew into the roles of his sister, his friend, and his mentor, guiding him through social crowds, explaining the colloquial expressions that often escaped his grasp.
“I’ll fix my brother,” Ellie would think to herself as a young girl. “I can be his teacher. I can cure his Autism.”
When Ellie was twelve-years-old, she sat her brother down in front of a computer screen and placed her hand above his, guiding his movements with the mouse. “His brain is wired differently,” Ellie explains, but when her brother plays games and follows learning programs online, “something clicks for him.”
Watching him control virtual players on his own accord, she recognized then the immense therapeutic potential of technology to support her brother and other children like him. While social interactions are often overwhelming and ambiguous—a mere change in intonation or a furrowed brow conveying various emotional signals—the ability to navigate a virtual task with the click of a button offers clarity and control. If technology could excite her brother and develop his focus and problem-solving abilities, perhaps it could improve the lives of many others with ASD.
From then on, Ellie’s faith in the clinical and therapeutic power of technology was unwavering. She entered Yale as a Biomedical Engineering major, eager to build machines and pioneer technology to support individuals with ASD. A few months into her first semester at Yale, Ellie built up the courage to cold email a clinical psychologist named Dr. James McPartland and ask for research opportunities in his lab.
Dr. McPartland—who insists on being called Jamie—is, to put it simply, a cool guy. He refuses to go by any other title, wears his hair in a low ponytail, and somehow manages to pull it off. Jamie studies ASD with clinical assessments, behavioral tasks, and neuroimaging technology at the Yale Child Study Center. Despite Ellie’s lack of prior research experience at Yale, Jamie emailed her back within a few hours. Ecstatic to bring a new perspective of Biomedical Engineering to a Psychology and Neuroscience-dominant work environment, he welcomed her to the lab.
Ellie’s experiences at the McPartland Lab range from literature review, analysis of neural data, and interactions with child patients and their parents. Although Jamie’s busy schedule does not allow her much face-time with her PI, the post-graduate fellows in the lab treat Ellie like one of their own. On her first day, she was assigned a specific fellow as her mentor, who explained the experimental designs of ongoing studies and accompanied her on clinical visits with children seeking diagnoses and treatment for ASD.
Despite this mentorship, the lab expects a high level of independence. It was up to Ellie to develop her own research questions and explore the behavioral and neural data collected in the lab over the years. Aware of her own brother’s difficulties sustaining eye contact and navigating social settings, Ellie was intrigued by the Reading the Mind and the Eyes Test (RMET), a psychological assessment administered in the lab that measures a participant’s ability to read emotions when presented with images of the eyes alone. Eager to also explore the lab’s neuroimaging technology, she decided to research how the emotional recognition abilities measured by the RMET relate to differences in the brain’s wiring.
The McPartland Lab is well-known within the clinical research community for its focus on the unique brain patterns that distinguish ASD. Jamie currently leads the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials, a multicenter longitudinal study that aims to identify neural biomarkers that indicate and measure social impairment symptoms. The N170 in particular is a neural response function that naturally emerges in the brain when individuals look at faces. Interestingly, individuals with ASD produce an N170 that differs from the neural signals produced by typically developing individuals.
Ellie’s research project assesses the relationship between emotional recognition—measured by RMET scores—and the neural response to social stimuli—measured by N170 activity. She learned to use SPSS and R coding software to separate RMET scores by high and low performance and assess differences in N170 latencies between these groups. She discovered that low performers on the RMET tend to produce the N170 signature associated with ASD while high performers tend to produce the N170 signature associated with the absence of ASD. These findings reflected Ellie’s own experiences with her brother, suggesting that individuals with ASD struggle to extract emotional and social information when looking at the eyes and faces of others.
Ellie submitted her research to the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), which accepted her work for presentation at its annual conference, scheduled to take place in Seattle later this month. However, due to the health risks posed by COVID-19, the conference canceled in-person presentations and is shifting to an online format. Although Ellie now works from her childhood bedroom in New Jersey rather than from the Yale Child Study Center, she pushes herself to finalize her research poster and summaries for the conference.
There is no question that COVID-19 has posed immense difficulties for Ellie’s research; she struggles to establish regular meetings with the fellows and access data located physically in New Haven or stored on private servers not secure for off-campus access. Yet Ellie is not one to shy away from challenge. If anything, COVID-19’s disruption has emphasized to Ellie the importance of prioritizing and pursuing virtual avenues for clinical research. She plans to spend the summer and upcoming fall semester reading studies and Zooming with Linguistics professors to develop a new project on how individuals with ASD express abnormal speech patterns and phrases.
Whether it be conference cancellations or the intellectual pressures of Biomedical Engineering, the challenges thrown in Ellie’s path merely remind her of promise to her brother. She carries with her both a “social responsibility” and a “sibling responsibility” to use Yale’s resources to protect her brother and others like him. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vast socioeconomic disparities and prejudices that divide our country. It’s during these times of uncertainty and dramatic change when individuals like Ellie make a difference in the world by fighting for marginalized communities. After completing her Biomedical Engineering degree at Yale, Ellie plans to earn an MD-PhD and pursue her dream of designing therapeutic devices to treat ASD. And nothing—not even a global pandemic—is going to stop her.
Due to the cancellation of the 2020 INSAR Conference, Ellie’s research in written and poster form are now available for view online.