Michael Lombardo won a second ERC grant for his research studies about heterogeneity in autism

Rovereto (Italy), January 31^st 2023 – Individuals with the diagnosis of autism are characterized by core early developmental difficulties in social-communication and restricted repetitive behaviors. Despite these commonalities, autistic individuals are quite varied in terms of underlying biology, later-life outcomes, and responses to treatment. Better understanding this heterogeneity between individuals is the primary focus of Prof Michael Lombardo, a tenured senior researcher and principal investigator at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) in Rovereto, Italy. The European Research Council (ERC) announced today that it will be funding Prof Lombardo with an ERC Consolidator Grant for his project “AUTISMS-3D – Disability versus Difference over Development in the Autisms”. The project will receive around 2 million euros for the next 5 years and its main goal will be to test whether stratifying autistic patients by a profile of different language, motor, intellectual and adaptive functioning skills can better isolate more specific discrete biological markers, outcomes, and responses to treatment.

Through a previous ERC Starting Grant, Prof Lombardo has laid the primary groundwork for this new project. This prior work has shown that autism can be clustered into at least 2 primary subtypes – a type I versus type II - which can be described by large differences in domains that are typically thought of as outside of the core autism phenotype, such as language, motor, intellectual, and adaptive functioning skills. These subtypes can be identified in an automated, objective, and data-driven fashion and are highly stable and robust. This enables Prof Lombardo to develop a model and software that can predict those same subtypes in new datasets. By applying the model to large international and locally collected datasets within the Trentino region of Italy, Prof Lombardo hopes to identify how these type I versus type II subtypes are different in terms of brain structure and function, but also in terms of how those individuals develop over time and how they differentially respond to early intervention treatment. This new project hopes to accelerate new knowledge about different types of autisms and may also help balance different perspectives that describe autism in terms of disability or as a qualitative difference.

Prof Lombardo heads the Neurodevelopmental Disorders research line and Laboratory for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders (LAND) at IIT’s Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems (CNCS) in Rovereto, Italy. Born in the USA, he got his start in autism research as an undergraduate in psychology at the University California Davis. After graduating with a BA in Psychology at UC Davis in 2004, he continued his early work on autism at the the UC Davis MIND Institute – a world leader in autism research. Prof Lombardo then moved to the UK in 2006 to pursue a PhD in autism research at the University of Cambridge, which he obtained in 2010. He would stay at the University of Cambridge until 2013 on prestigious post-doctoral fellowships from the British Academy and Jesus College, Cambridge. In 2013, he started his first faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cyprus (UCY), where he stayed until 2019. In January 2018, he won his first ERC Starting Grant (AUTISMS) and soon after moved to the IIT around mid-2019.

Prof Lombardo is among the 21 researchers in Italy who have won the Consolidator Grants announced by European Research Council today. The grant is for researchers with at least seven years of experience after their PhD, and aimed at consolidating their scientific activity on projects of excellence. The funding - worth in total €657 million – is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme and involves 321 researchers across Europe, of 37 different nationalities, who will conduct their projects in 21 distinct countries.

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