Audrey Brumback, MD, PhD
UT Health Austin
Audrey Brumback, MD, PhD, is a board-certified physician-scientist specializing in child neurology at UT Health Austin Pediatric Neurosciences at Dell Children’s. She specializes in the care of patients with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. Her research focuses on developing novel therapies for brain dysfunction based on modulation of neurophysiology. Dr. Brumback’s goal is to develop brain-circuit-based therapies for the developmental neuropsychiatric disorders she treats in her clinical practice. Additionally, Dr. Brumback is an assistant professor in both the Dell Medical School Department of Neurology and the Dell Medical School Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Brumback earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at The University of Texas at Austin. She then obtained her medical degree and doctorate in neuroscience at the University of Colorado under the mentorship of Kevin Staley. During this time, she helped establish the scientific basis for a novel treatment for neonatal seizures. She completed pediatric neurology residency through the Neuroscience Pathway at the University of California, San Francisco. Under the mentorship of Vikaas Sohal, Dr. Brumback built upon her strong medical and neurophysiology background to study and treat autism spectrum disorder. In her postdoctoral work, she discovered that three mouse models of autism share a common defect in the prefrontal cortex in a particular class of neurons. Using in vivo calcium imaging, she observed that this population of neurons does not activate appropriately during social behavior in autism model mice. As a result of her training, she is a nationally recognized expert in the clinical assessment and management of autism spectrum disorders and related disorders such as Rett syndrome.
Dr. Brumback joined the faculty at Dell Medical School in 2017. She is also a member of the Department of Neuroscience at UT Austin and a member of the Center for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Neuroscience at UT Austin. Dr. Brumback’s work is supported externally by a K08 career development award from the NINDS / NIH, and the Philip R. Dodge Young Investigator Award from the Child Neurology Society. Previously, she held an NIH R25 award, an NIH K12 award, a Pilot Award for Junior Investigators in Basic and Clinical/Translational Sciences from UCSF, and the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Foundation Scientific Research Grant from the Child Neurology Foundation. Dr. Brumback also was selected for the Autism Speaks Translational Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013. Dr. Brumback is a prolific writer and researcher. At Dell Children’s Medical Center she leads a team of researchers, who work to understand how changes in the brain’s electrical activity cause the symptoms that many people with these disorders experience. She is also a nationally recognized expert in the clinical assessment and management of autism spectrum disorders and related disorders. Her long-term research goal is to develop therapies for the clinical features of neurodevelopmental conditions that cause disability. Working toward this goal, her current work in her laboratory is focused on functionally mapping the thalamocortical network involved in autism.