GEARs Autism Center of Excellence Network
Combining large-scale data to unlock answers
By leveraging data from 175,000 individuals across 18 sites, the GEARs Network (Combining Advances in Genomics and Environmental Science to Accelerate Actionable Research and Practice in ASD), has the potential to shed light on how genetic predispositions and environmental factors converge to influence Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Environmental factors include things like air pollution, prenatal maternal infections, and prenatal nutrition, among others.
For information about the GEARs ACE Network, contact Jessica Walton.
Each of the sites and studies involved will contribute anonymized data in accordance with their particular study rules, data use agreements, and participant consents. The data is "de-identified," so researchers will not know the names or other personal information about the people who contributed the data.
The sites and studies and their principal investigators are:
- Baby Siblings Research Consortium
- Canadian Infant Sibling Study (Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, MD)
- Kennedy Krieger (Rebecca Landa, PhD)
- Miami (Daniel Messenger, PhD)
- University of California Davis (Sally Ozonoff, PhD)
- Boston Birth Cohort (Xiaobin Wang, MD, ScD)
- Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and Environment (CHARGE, Irva Hertz-PIcciotto, PhD)
- Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI; Dani Fallin, PhD)
- Early Markers for Autism (EMA, Lisa Croen, PhD)
- ECHO (Environmental impacts on Child Health Outcomes, Brian Smith, coordinating center principal investigator)
- IMPACT (Lisa Croen, PhD)
- IBIS (Infant Brain Imaging Study; Joseph Piven, MD)
- IPSYCH (Jakob Grove, PhD)
- MARBLES (Markers of Autism Risk in Babies—Learning Early Signs; Rebecca Schmidt, PhD)
- Study to Explore Early Development (SEED)
- Simons Simplex Collection
- SPARK (Wendy Chung, MD, PhD)
- AGRE (Autism Genetic Resource Exchange; Dean Hartley, PhD)
- POND (Province of Ontario Neurodevelopmental Disorders Network, Evdokia Anagnostou, MD)
GEARs Network Mission Statement
The GEARs Network aims to discover modifiable influences on genes associated with autism. We aim to understand how these factors affect not only autism itself, but co-occurring conditions that limit autistic people’s quality of life. Our goal is to translate this work into actions that benefit people with autism and their families.