People

Oncology imaging, including imaging of paediatric neuroendocrine tumours

Radiotherapy using unsealed sources of radiation

SPECT technology and image reconstruction

MR technology

Electrophysiology equipment

Visual development in preterm, newborn and infants

Objective assessment of visual acuity

Signal detection

Modelling visual impairment

Jonathan Delafield-Butt is Professor of Child Development and Director of the Laboratory for Innovation in Autism at Strathclyde.  His work examines the origins of conscious experience and the embodied and emotional foundations of psychological development, with attention to the subtle but significant motor disruption evident in autism spectrum disorder.  He took his Ph.D. in Developmental Neurobiology at the University of Edinburgh Medical School before extending to Developmental Psychology with application of intersubjectivity theory in postdoctoral work at the Universities of Edinburgh and Copenhagen.  He held scholarships at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh for science-philosophy bridgework.  Delafield-Butt trained pre-clinically in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Scottish Institute for Human Relations.  He is a member of the World Association for Infant Mental Health and the International Society for Autism Research. His team currently develops bespoke wearable and smart device serious games to characterise the motor disruption in autism spectrum disorder, and its social and psychological consequences.  He collaborates with the University of Pisa on brainstem imaging of young children with autism, a likely contributor to the motor disruption in ASD, and with colleagues at Glasgow and Edinburgh on a new, SINAPSE-supported 7T brainstem imaging project. 

I am a practising child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Aberdeen and Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital in Scotland. I also have a long-standing interest in evolutionary biology. After medical school and some time as a junior doctor, I took some time out to study Lyme disease and tick ecology in wild mouse populations up on the West Coast of Scotland. I have continued to mix interests in evolutionary biology and psychiatry, and since moving to Aberdeen have also developed an interest in neuroimaging. The interests have converged on the ‘mirror neuron’ hypothesis of autism, that has lain at the centre of my research interests for the past 10 years.