Pop Star: Dr. Nancy Minshew

In the world of autism research she is already a legend.

The place where she works, the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Excellence in Autism Research, was just designated as an Autism Center for Excellence by the National Institutes of Health. Along the way Dr. Nancy Minshew has also attracted major talent to the region. (See Pop City story here.)

Dr. Minshew has been hard at work, groundbreaking work, for 20 years, putting Pittsburgh on the map and making quite a name for herself. The research she and her team have done has helped doctors pinpoint the exact location of the brain disorder and changed thinking about autism as a systems disorder. Minshew believes that the problem of autism will be more fully understood and and that it will be solved eventually, perhaps in her lifetime.

That was her on the front page of the Post Gazette earlier this year refuting an upcoming TV show that maintained that autism may be caused by immunizations.

And this weekend she will speak at a major conference on autism that gets underway at Carnegie Mellon-- the 2008 Carnegie Symposium on Development and Brain Systems in Autism. (She urges you to attend. It's free and open to the public.)

Her center, with the acronym CeFAR, received two major grants this past year, one from NIH for $9.6 million over five years, the other in September for $12 million over three years from HRSA.

While the amount is impressive, it translates to years of painstaking interviews, tests, and documentation. “If you want something good,” Dr. Minshew says, “something that works, it takes a tremendous amount of work. It takes mechanisms, a rigorous method for testing. It’s all in the details. There are lots and lots and lots of details. Any mistake at any step costs valuable information. So it takes a lot of people to do this – and everybody has to be pretty obsessive.”

It’s a tough path to walk for the slim and stylish Los Angeles native who earned a Mills College chemistry BA, and a Washington University MD, then, after a posting in Dallas, came to Pitt in ’84.

Along with her parrot Andy (for Hans Christian Andersen) and cat Zeus (at a mammoth 13 pounds “very regal,” she says, “very intelligent”), Minshew lives in Summerset at Frick, which she praises for its diversity and quiet – and 10-minute commute to work.

An inveterate traveler (Italy is a favorite) and reader (“anything,” she says, “with content”), her quest to find the cause – and eventually a cure – for autism began two decades ago while working in an in-patient unit. As a neurologist, she was treating seizures, while a colleague was handling what was then ill-defined, ill-treated autism. “There was no logic to it,” she recalls.

Finding lots of theories about autism but little hard evidence, Minshew “set out to generate a lot of evidence,” she says, “and disprove a lot of theories.”

What Minshew found is that “the brain comes pre-wired,” she says, “and it waits for experience to teach it things, for example, to recognize faces or emotions.” With autism, however, the brain is more or less short-circuited. So autistic people have strained social skills. “They have difficulty attaching meaning to facts,” Minshew says. “They don’t know what’s relevant. They can remember details but can’t get the big picture. They can’t problem-solve because they don’t know when they have problems.”

Testing for the earliest signs of autism, early diagnoses will help researchers develop treatments. “The key is in finding the cause,” Minshew says. “In some cases we’ve already found genes. We’re a lot farther along than we were 10 years ago.”

“There’s always luck,” she says. “And hope. There’s always hope. Lots of hope.”

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Pop City Innovation and Job Growth News Editor Deb Smit contributed to this story.

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Photographs copyright Brian Cohen
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