Jed Elison

Jed Elison is a Professor at the Institute of Child Development within the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He is renowned for his work in developmental social neuroscience, focusing on neural mechanisms of early social communication and autism pathogenesis. He serves as a co-investigator for the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS), funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and contributes to major neuroimaging projects like the UNC/UMN Baby Connectome Project (BCP).

• BA, Psychology and English, University of Utah (2005)
• PhD, Psychology, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (2011)
• Postdoc, Social Neuroscience, California Institute of Technology (2013)

Elison’s research centers on developmental social neuroscience, structural brain development, social cognition, and early autism identification using neuroimaging (MRI, DWI). His work explores how visual attention and white matter organization influence social communication in infants and toddlers, with implications for autism and emerging psychopathology. Recent publications emphasize longitudinal trajectories of gestural language, brain-behavior associations, and neurodevelopmental heterogeneity.

His scientific accolades include the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development and Distinguished McKnight University Professor titles. Elison actively mentors graduate students and collaborates with interdisciplinary teams in the Cognition and Neurodevelopmental Studies Lab.