Honorary Research Associate Alex Tsompanidis has received the 2023 Dissertation Award by INSAR at their international conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

The award, accompanied by a prize of $1500, was given to Alex by a committee of autism researchers, who graded more than a hundred doctoral dissertations from around the world, using the scoring criteria for grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health of the US.

INSAR, the International Society of Autism Research is a scientific and professional organization devoted to advancing knowledge about autism. INSAR also organises annual conferences, attended by thousands of researchers. During the 2023 conference and following the announcement of the award, Alex also had the opportunity to present the main findings of his PhD and attend a meeting of the INSAR Board at the Nobel Prize museum in Stockolm.

His PhD was funded, in part, by a Peterhouse Graduate Studentship and focused on “sex differences in perinatal development and autism”, leading to new findings and several publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Alex, his PhD supervisor, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, and a team of autism researchers from the UK and Israel, have now received a multi-million pound grant by the Simons Foundation, in order to further investigate these findings. Alex has also recently been named as one of the “top 40 under 40” autism researchers by Spectrum magazine. His research aims to understand sex differences in autism likelihood, and the role of the placenta in neurodevelopment.