Martha Denckla, MD
Martha Denckla graduated summa cum laude from Bryn
Mawr College and went on to graduate cum laude from Harvard Medical
School in 1962, where she trained with Dr. Norman Geschwind in
behavioral neurology. Dr. Denckla served residencies at Beth Israel
Hospital and Veterans Administration Hospital, both in Boston, as well
as Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC. After
positions in neurology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New
York and Harvard Medical School, she served as the director of the
learning disabilities clinic at the Children's Hospital. She came to the
Maryland area in 1982 to serve as chief of the section on autism and
related disorders at the developmental neurology branch of the
Neurological Disorders Program at the National Institute of Neurological
and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NIH). She came to Johns Hopkins
and KKI in 1987. Dr. Denckla has served as an Adjunct Professor of
Education at the Johns Hopkins School of Education since 2009. She is
currently director of the Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at
the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and holds the Batza Family Endowed Chair
at Kennedy Krieger. She is principal investigator of an NIH-funded
research Center P50 HD052121.
Session: SG1-Plenary-Understanding the
Neurobiological Basis of ADHD: 25 Years of Innovation in
Research
Remarkable new research methods (various uses of MRI,
physiological TMS probes), allied with advances in direct measurements
of behaviors, have secured evidence confirming that ADHD has
neurobiological origins. These brain causes of ADHD, however, are
many in terms of localization and in terms of underlying mechanism, at
least one of which (maybe even the majority) may be the delayed timing
of frontal lobe development.
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