Judy Van de Water, Ph.D.

Dr. Judy Van de Water has a broad background in clinical immunology and immunopathology, with specific training and expertise in the gestational immune environment. Over the past 20 years, she expanded her research to include the immunobiological aspects associated with autism, which includes the maternal gestational immune environment, and how perturbation during gestation can impact the developing brain. Dr. Van de Water's laboratory has worked to successfully understand the maternal cellular immune response and the humoral immune response during pregnancy and how dysregulation in these systems relates to neurobehavioral disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Her group discovered the role of maternal autoantibodies in the development of autism spectrum disorder that has led to the definition of a new sub-phenotype of ASD arising through this mechanism.

Dr. Van de Water is a Co-Investigator on the UC Davis Conte Center, studying neuroimmune mechanisms of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and serves as the PI of Project 1. In this role, she will investigate the immune mechanisms behind the differential basal immune response in rodent model that results in either susceptibility or resilience to MIA induced changes in neurodevelopment. Working with Project 3, Dr. Van de Water will examine the baseline immune response of the non-human primate MIA model to determine if there is a differential baseline immune response that leads to differences in the post-poly I:C response during gestation as well as changes in behavioral outcome and brain structure/function. In addition to her work in the Conte Center, Dr. Van de Water is a Co-Director of the NICHD-funded MIND Institute Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, for which she heads the Molecular and Biological Analysis Core and is PI of the project embedded in the IDDRC. In addition, she the Associate Director for Biological Sciences at the UC Davis MIND Institute.