Northeastern professor honored at Aspen Ideas Festival

CCIS’ Matthew Goodwin was named a Spotlight Health Scholar at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual event produced by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

The festival gathers interdisciplinary leaders to discuss the biggest issues facing the world today. About 300 attendees were named 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival Scholars, Arthur Vining Davis Fellows or Spotlight Health Scholars. These scholars are nominated by trustees, advisors and senior Aspen Institute staff members, and selected for their work, their achievements and their ability to turn ideas into action. The festival, now in its 10^th year, draws 3,000 attendees to hear 350 speakers lecture and to attend 200 sessions led by thinkers from a vast array of disciplines, from arts and sciences to humanities and business.

“It was incredible,” says Goodwin, an interdisciplinary assistant professor in health science at Bouvé and computer science at CCIS, who attended the festival for the first time this year. “The collection of people is just mind-blowing. It’s thought leaders in government, in politics, in industry, in NGOs, in community organizations, all together, exchanging what the major initiatives they’re all working on are.”

Goodwin, who also serves as a scientific advisory board member for Autism Speaks, was nominated by that organization for his work researching innovative ways to measure behavior as it relates to autism spectrum disorders. These include wearable technology that measures physiology and physical activity and camera systems that do automated detection of certain behaviors and speech analysis – what Goodwin describes as a “living lab,” bringing lab-based data collection tools into natural spaces.

Goodwin’s work will be useful in later phases of Autism Speaks’ MSSNG project, a collaboration with Google that will include 10,000 families with a child affected by autism. The project will gather data sets from genome wide association scans, and that data will be made available to geneticists for analysis. The next step of this project will work to link genetic discoveries to behavior and development, which is where Goodwin’s research comes in.

“Some of the measures I’ve been working on around motor activity, physiological responding and in-home/in-class natural video based methods, they think would be complementary to the genetic information,” he says.