Dr. Anna Gui

Email: agui01@mail.bbk.ac.uk

Anna is a developmental researcher currently working as a senior post-doc at the GEL Lab with Profs. A. Ronald, M. Johnson and F. Dudbridge. She is interested in uncovering the genetic bases of motor development in infancy and understand how biological mechanisms underlying early sensory-motor atypicalities are linked to autism.

During her PhD, Anna was supervised by Dr. E. Meaburn, Prof. E. Jones and Prof. M. Johnson and collected DNA and behavioural data from family members of the children who participated in the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings (https://www.staars.org/gbasis), in order to study neural, genetic and epigenetic signatures of behavioural differences in social attention.

During her previous post-doc, Anna coordinated the Behaviour and Online Neuroimaging to study the Development of Socialisation (BONDS) and Transformative Approach with Babies in the Scanner (TABS) studies, looking at brain responses to social stimuli to identify individual differences in infant attention profiles (PIs: Profs. E. Jones, R. Leech and F. Dick).

Training

PhD in Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London (2019).

MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience (Distinction), University of Trento, Italy (2015).

First level Italian MSc in Child Rehabilitation and Research Methodology (Distinction), University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy (2013).

BSc in Neurological and Psychomotor Approach Therapy (First), University of Padova, Italy (2008).

Publications

Fish L.A., Nyström P., Gliga T., Gui A., Begum Ali J., Mason L. et al., Development of the pupillary light reflex from 9 to 24 months: associations with common autism spectrum disorder (ASD) genetic liability and 3-year ASD diagnosis (2021), Journal Child Psychology & Psychiatry, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13518

Gui A., Meaburn E., Tye C., Charman T., Johnson M.H., Jones E.J.H. (2021), Association of polygenic liability for autism with face-sensitive cortical responses from infancy, JAMA Pediatrics, 175(9):968-970, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.1338

Gui A. (2021), A neurodevelopmental perspective on sex-differentiated genetic effects on behavior, Biological Psychiatry, 89:12, e63-e65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2021.04.011

Gui A., Bussu G., Tye C., Elsabbagh M., Charman T., Johnson M.H. and Jones E.J.H. (2021), Attentive brain states to faces in infants with and without later autism, Translational Psychiatry, 11: 196. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-021-01315-9.

Gui A., Mason, L., Gliga, T., Hendry, A., Begum Ali, J., Pasco G., Shephard E., Curtis C., Charman T., Johnson M.H., Meaburn E., Jones E.J.H. and the BASIS team (2020),Look duration at the face as a developmental endophenotype: elucidating pathways to Autism and ADHD, Development and Psychopathology, 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579420000930

Gui A., Jones E.J.H., Wong C.C.Y., Meaburn E., Xia B., Pasco G., Lloyd-Fox S., Charman T., Bolton P., Johnson M.H. & the BASIS team (2020), Leveraging epigenetics to understand developmental trajectories of social attention: A proof-of-principle study of DNA methylation in infants with an older sibling with autism, Infant Behavior and Development, 60: 101409, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2019.101409

Braithwaite E., Gui A., Jones E. (2020), Social attention: What is it, how can we measure it, and what can it tell us about autism and ADHD?, in Sabine Hunnius, Marlene Meyer, Progress in Brain Research: Early Social-Cognitive Development, Elsevier,254: 271-303, https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pbr.2020.05.007

Gui, A. (2019) Evaluating the role of social attention in the causal path to Autism Spectrum Disorder, Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London. http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/id/eprint/444