Yale School of Medicine

Yale Wins Nearly $25M Grant to Map Brain Development, Autism Origins

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Yale Wins Nearly $25M Grant to Map Brain Development, Autism Origins

New Haven, Connecticut – September 07, 2026 -- Yale School of Medicine (YSM) has secured close to $25 million in research funding from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) program, part of ARIA's Human Neurodevelopment Research Centers initiative. The funding will support efforts to build a foundational atlas and model of human brain development, pinpointing when autism-related developmental differences first emerge and how they diverge from typical developmental trajectories.

Yale Secures $25M ARIA Grant to Map Developing Brain, Autism Origins

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Yale Secures $25M ARIA Grant to Map Developing Brain, Autism Origins

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Aug. 31, 2026 -- Yale School of Medicine has secured a nearly $25 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism (ARIA) initiative to build the first high-resolution map of the developing human brain and pinpoint where autism diverges from typical neural development.

The award, part of ARIA's Human Developmental Neurobiology Research Hub, funds two Yale-led projects within a four-project collaboration that also involves Harvard University. Combined, the initiative targets a gap researchers say has stalled autism drug and diagnostic development for decades: no detailed reference map exists for how the human brain wires itself in the first years of life.