Shelby Grebbin was Spectrum’s editorial assistant. Before joining Spectrum, she was staff assistant at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. As a freelance journalist, she has covered stories related to public health, data transparency and prison health care. Shelby has a B.A. in journalism from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Shelby Grebbin
Editorial Assistant
From this contributor
Researchers publish new dataset on minimally verbal autistic people
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published the first repository of vocalizations from minimally verbal autistic people. Those with few or no spoken words still produce a range of phonemes, or units of sound, that may serve as developmental markers or intervention targets.

Researchers publish new dataset on minimally verbal autistic people
Autism and menopause: Q&A with Rachel Moseley and Julie Turner-Cobb
Menopause poses significant challenges for autistic people, according to a small survey published in 2020 — the first to explore the transition among people with autism traits.

Autism and menopause: Q&A with Rachel Moseley and Julie Turner-Cobb
Web-based autism screening service raises a host of concerns
Neurona Health, a company in San Francisco, California, backed away from part of its newly launched services after Spectrum started reporting about them.

Web-based autism screening service raises a host of concerns
Explore more from The Transmitter
Null and Noteworthy: Neurons tracking sequences don’t fire in order
Instead, neurons encode the position of sequential items in working memory based on when they fire during ongoing brain wave oscillations—a finding that challenges a long-standing theory.

Null and Noteworthy: Neurons tracking sequences don’t fire in order
Instead, neurons encode the position of sequential items in working memory based on when they fire during ongoing brain wave oscillations—a finding that challenges a long-standing theory.
How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)
Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.

How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)
Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.
Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior
Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior
Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.