The PENN/CHOP Center for Autism Research (PENN/CHOP CAR) will be the single entity that will coordinate, sponsor and support all autism-related research at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The scope of the PENN/CHOP CAR will include basic and clinical research as well as community-based research that will directly address the issues affecting children with autism and their families in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the fifth largest urban area in the United States. With 15 PENN faculty members from 9 departments and 3 Schools, each of whom shares a strong interest in autism research and abiding commitment to this patient population. The development of the Center will emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, translational research and clinical/societal impact. These goals will be realized via cooperative research projects involving basic and clinical scientists and by forging strong and enduring partnerships with the local community. It will strive to embrace genomic-scale biomedical research and advancing the biology of tomorrow to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic frontiers. This priority is clearly realized by our individual research projects, which use epidemiological, electrophysiological and genomics approaches to elucidate susceptibility factors, endophenotypes and the developmental sequence of autism spectrum phenotypes.

1. To act as the intellectual hub for multiple investigators from diverse disciplines conducting research aimed at finding causes and therapeutic or preventative interventions for children with ASD
2. To enroll a cohort of individuals with ASD ages 6 to 11 years to participate in the three research projects outlined below and to engage in longitudinal research that build on the findings of these initial three
3. To coordinate infrastructure and resources across Penn and CHOP to facilitate, stimulate and synergize collaborative research among Center investigators within and across each research core
4. To attract new investigators into autism research and to engage all research core faculty in the educational mission of the Community Outreach Program;
5. To train a new cadre of graduate students in autism research
6. To disseminate research findings to the community.

The development of the Center will employ a collective recruitment and enrollment process that will establish a cohort of carefully characterized study subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorders who will participate in the projects described here and in future investigations that will evolve from the establishment of the Center at Penn.