When Gloria Choi was making plans to launch her research lab at MIT, nearly 10 years ago, she thought it would be nice to find a side project where she could collaborate with her husband, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School.
The two scientists decided to look into a startling observation they had heard about as graduate students: A large study from Denmark showed that severe infections in pregnant women were correlated with a much higher risk of their children developing autism. Their work on this phenomenon, known as maternal immune activation, has since become a cornerstone of both of their research programs and yielded key insights into the mechanisms underlying this elevated risk.
