Dr. Maria Chahrour is an Associate Professor in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development, the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry, and the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense, and an investigator in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW). She is the Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UTSW. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology from the American University of Beirut prior to attending the University of North Texas for an M.S. in Forensic Genetics and Baylor College of Medicine for a Ph.D. in Molecular and Human Genetics. She then joined Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital as a Postdoctoral Fellow and later as an Instructor in the Division of Genetics and Genomics. Dr. Chahrour was recruited to UTSW in 2015 where she established her research program to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder and related neurodevelopmental conditions through gene identification and functional studies to delineate the impacted pathways and inform diagnosis and the development of targeted therapies. Maria resides in Dallas with her husband and two sons.