Barbara Thompson has been conducting research on neurodevelopment since her postdoctoral fellowship. As an undergraduate and then graduate student, she had a strong desire to take well-established translational neuroscience tools and apply them into clinical populations.

"The beauty of science is the more questions you ask, the more answers you get, the more questions that actually opens up the door to," Thompson said.

As a result, Thompson and her team were the first to demonstrate social conditioned place preference in humans. She’s using that technique to examine social motivation differences in kids with autism. The children, ages 2 1/2 to 5 1/2 years old, get to do what kids do best – play. Becca Ribbens brought her 3-year-old son, Leo, to the Social and Emotional Neurodevelopment Lab inside the Secchia Center in Grand Rapids, where he plays inside a castle that’s just his size.