Dr. Lajiness-O’Neill is a professor, pediatric neuropsychologist, and neuroscientist. She specializes in the assessment and treatment of neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., learning and language disorders, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder) and social/emotional concerns arising from a host of developmental and medical etiologies. She has specific interest in prematurity, HIE, genetic disorders, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Lajiness-O’Neill is also a clinician-scientist whose research is focused on the development of screening/surveillance methods and early risk detection in infancy and toddlerhood. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). She has been leading a R01 multisite, longitudinal study for which her team is developing and validating a web-based, caregiver-report tool to track infant/toddler developmental status and risk trajectories for neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., language disorders, autism) and complex medical etiologies (e.g., congenital heart disease, craniofacial disorders). Using item response theory (IRT) test construction methods, her team hopes to advance personalized medicine approaches to assessment and methods to track response to intervention in children. She is also Project Director/Principal Investigator of a NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant for which her team is developing electroencephalography (EEG) methods for infancy and toddlerhood studies. Her long-term goal is to develop and validate bio-behavioral methods of assessing childhood conditions to advance early detection. She has over 70 peer-reviewed publications, books and book chapters as well as over 200 presentations.
Research and Clinical Interests: Neuropsychological assessment and test construction, risk detection and algorithms to track developmental status and trajectories, socio-contextual risk factors, neurodevelopmental conditions (ADHD, language/learning disorders, ASD), prematurity, HIE, genetic disorders, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.
- BS, Psychology & Occupational Therapy, Eastern Michigan University, 1983
- MS, Clinical Psychology, Eastern Michigan University, 1991
- Ph.D., Clinical Psychology (dual specialization in neuropsychology and child clinical), Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 1996
- Clinical Psychology Internship, Primary Children's Medical Center, Salt Lake City, UT, 1996
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Clinical and Research Neuropsychology, University of Michigan Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998
Education & Training
Dr. Lajiness-O’Neill’s publications are indexed in PubMed.