Lynn K. Paul

Lynn Paul's research is broadly focused on understanding the role that cortical connectivity plays in development of higher-order social cognition and the brain's capacity for reorganization during development. Utilizing eye-tracking, standardized neuropsychological instruments, and experimental behavioral paradigms in combination with neuroimaging, Dr. Paul's work aims to understand how brain structure and function are adapted to compensate for developmental and acquired brain lesions, what limitations remain in spite of these adaptations, and how these factors in combination may contribute to long-term deficits in learning, social cognition, emotion processing, and long-term adaptive functioning.

She has ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies with several unique populations, notably people with congenital malformations of the corpus callosum (ACC / DCC), adults who had hemispherectomy during childhood, and adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). She is currently conducting the first prospective longitudinal study of infants with callosal agenesis, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Paul is the founding president of the International Research Consortium for the Corpus Callosum and Cerebral Connectivity (IRC5), a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort to understand the causes, consequences, and effective interventions for disorders of the corpus callosum and associated disorders of cerebral connectivity. She serves as a scientific advisor to multiple patient groups in the US and abroad: the Brain Recovery Project Childhood Epilepsy Foundation, the Global Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Patient Registry, the National Organization for Disorders of the Corpus Callosum (NODCC), Australian Disorder of the Corpus Callosum (AusDoCC) and Corpal.

At Caltech, Dr. Paul also contributes expertise in psychological and neurocognitive assessment to a variety of social science research projects. She is principal investigator on the Psychological Assessment Core of the Caltech Conte Center for the Neurobiology of Social Decision Making and is directs the newly formed Chen Social Decision Neuroscience Participant Center in the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience.

Dr. Paul is a California licensed clinical psychologist since 2000. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Fuller Graduate School of Psychology and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology from the Department of Neurology, UCLA.