When Gloria Choi was making plans to launch her research lab at MIT, nearly 10 years ago, she thought it would be nice to find a side project where she could collaborate with her husband, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School. The two scientists decided to look into a startling observation they had heard about as graduate students: A large study from Denmark showed that severe infections in pregnant women were correlated with a much higher risk of their children developing autism. Their work on this phenomenon, known as maternal immune activation, has since become a cornerstone of both of their research programs and yielded key insights into the mechanisms underlying this elevated risk. Choi, the Mark Hyman Jr Career Development Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, who recently earned tenure at MIT, and her husband, Jun Huh, an associate professor of immunology at Harvard, have also shown that an immune molecule called IL-17a, which is produced by immune cells...
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