Rate My Professor Elizabeth Shephard

Elizabeth Shephard is a professor at the Instituto de Psicologia of the Universidade de São Paulo. Originally from Scotland, she joined the university in 2018 as a visiting researcher in the Departamento de Psiquiatria at the Faculdade de Medicina, supported by a FAPESP grant. She subsequently secured a FAPESP Young Investigator award and, in 2024, was appointed as professora doutora following a competitive concurso at the Instituto de Psicologia.

Her research centers on neurodevelopment, with a focus on early signs and pathways in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She leads the Projeto Floreah, a longitudinal study tracking neurodevelopmental trajectories in Brazilian infants with and without familial risk for these conditions, incorporating a randomized trial of a preemptive intervention. She collaborates on the implementation of Paediatric Autism Communication Therapy in Brazil and has contributed to studies on neurocircuitry in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Key publications include work on early developmental pathways to ADHD, anxiety, and autism symptoms (2019), a neurocircuit-based taxonomy for OCD treatment (2021), and a systematic review of early-life precursors and interventions for ADHD (2022). She maintains an active research group and teaches courses in cognitive neuroscience of development and caregiver-child interventions.