Biosketch
During the summer after my sophomore year of college I signed on to work as a camp counselor at a sleep-away camp for adolescents and adults with mental retardation. I had no prior experience working with this population but I was assured by the camp director that the experience would change my life. I am not sure he really knew how true this statement would become. Along with many fond memories, camp left me with many questions and frustrations about the needs and capacities of people with developmental delay. I was surprised at how people with the same cognitive capacity could function so differently during day-to-day tasks. I grew to realize just how critical intervention, environment and learning is at an early age, and how many fewer skills were apparent in adults who had lived their whole lives in institutions. Armed with a host of questions I went back to my university looking for someone to help me learn more about these individuals. I spent the next two years working as a research assistant for a researcher studying language development in Williams and Downs syndrome and focused my courses on psychological research, neurobiology, and abnormal development. This sparked the beginning of my career in developmental disabilities research.
Research Interests
My primary research interest is in understanding why people who have the same genetic developmental disorder have many of the same behavioral characteristics, why some characteristics vary within a population, and what neurobiological mechanisms account for these behaviors. Most of my work is directed at understanding several behavioral characteristics of individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), including hyperphagia, compulsive behavior, and social functioning. One of my current studies focuses on examining the compulsive food and nonfood rituals exhibited by people with PWS. In addition to behavioral measures of compulsivity, I use functional neuroimaging to examine the regions of the brain involved in processing food-related information and compulsivity for individuals with and without Prader-Willi syndrome.
Courses Taught
- PSCL 453 - MR Seminar: Neuroimaging of Neurodevelopmental Disabilities and Other Disorders
- PSCL 379 - Neurodevelopmental Disabilities
- PSCL 375 - Research Design and Analysis in Psychology
Recent/Relevant Publications (2001-present)
Feurer, I. D., Dimitropoulos, A., Stone, W. L., Roof, E., Butler, M., & Thompson, T. (1998). The latent variable structure of the Compulsive Behaviour Checklist in people with Prader-Willi syndrome. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 42(6), 472-480.
Dimitropoulos, A., Feurer, I. D., Roof, E., Stone, W., Butler, M. G., Sutcliffe, J., & Thompson, T. (2000). Appetitive behavior, compulsivity, and neurochemistry in Prader-Willi syndrome. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 6(2), 125-130.
Dimitropoulos, A., Feurer, I., & Thompson, T. (2000). Factor structure of compulsive behavior in children with Prader-Willi syndrome, children with Down syndrome, and typically developing children (Abstract). Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 44(3 & 4), 266.
Dimitropoulos, A., Feurer, I., Butler, M., & Thompson, T. (2001). Emergence of compulsive behavior and tantrums in children with Prader-Willi syndrome. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 106(1), 39-51.
Dimitropoulos, A., Blackford, J., Walden, T., & Thompson, T. (2005). Compulsive behavior in PWS: Examining severity in early childhood. Research in Developmental Disabilities, Jun 9, [epub ahead of print].
Scahill, L., McDougle, C. J., Williams, S., Dimitropoulos, A., Aman, M. G., McCracken, J., Tierney, E., Vitiello, B., et al. (in press). The use of the Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale in pervasive developmental disorders. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
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