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For Researchers

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC)

IDDRC Director: Gabriel S. Dichter, Ph.D.

Associate Director: Joseph Piven, M.D.

Assistant Director:  Jose Rodríguez-Romaguera, Ph.D.

Welcome to the UNC Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. The UNC IDDRC is one of 14 IDDRCs supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). If you are a funded investigator at UNC Chapel Hill and are completing research relevant to neurodevelopmental disorders, you can request access to the UNC IDDRC research cores to support your investigations. Our IDDRC investigators represent a range of disciplines across clinical and basic science, including members of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, the Gillings School of Public Health, the UNC Neuroscience Center, and more than 20 different UNC Departments.

Major research themes in the UNC IDDRC include:

  • Autism and related syndromes, focusing on gene-brain-behavior relationships
  • Early development of brain and behavior, with longitudinal studies in populations at low and elevated likelihood for developing neurogenetic conditions
  • Early detection and intervention, including psychopharmacology, early education/behavioral programs, and preclinical, high-throughput drug discovery and gene therapy initiatives

Explore below to learn more about the IDDRC research cores at UNC Chapel Hill:

 

The Clinical Translational Core is part of UNC Chapel Hill’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC). The goals of the Clinical Translational Core are to connect researchers with study participants, as well as to provide cutting-edge tools, resources, expert consultation, and training in multi-modal brain measurement, including MRI/DTI/fMRI brain imaging, EEG/ERP, fNIRs, and eye-tracking. Explore below to learn more about the Clinical Translational Core resources that are available to researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill:

Explore below to learn more about the Pre-Clinical Core resources that are available to researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill:

 

The Data Science Core is part of UNC Chapel Hill’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC). The goals of the Data Science Core are to enhance the productivity of UNC IDDRC investigators and the quality of their research. The Data Science Core can assist IDDRC projects with study design, data management, as well as statistical and bioinformatics analyses. This assistance has ranged from simple consultation to answering specific data management or analysis questions, to collaborative involvement from the design stage through proposal writing, data collection and management, to the publication of results. With each phase of research, the Data Science Core brings the unique perspectives of psychometricians, biometricians, professionally trained database managers, and a support staff of proficient programmers and data managers. Through the Data Science Core, researchers can gain support with:

  • Writing grant proposals
  • Developing efficient experimental designs
  • Designing data collection instruments and conducting pilot tests
  • Designing and implementing database management systems
  • Supervising execution of the study and collection of data
  • Operating database management systems to clean, store, and retrieve and archive data
  • Performing statistical and bioinformatics analyses and writing research papers and reports

See below for the bioinformatics and biostatistical consulting available to researchers at UNC’s IDDRC:

All publications and presentations that include assistance from the UNC IDDRC should acknowledge this support using this language: “Assistance for this project was provided by the UNC Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (NICHD; P50 HD103573).”