Brain development in the clinic and the classroom | Karen Parker & Jason Yeatman (with the Future of Everything podcast)

On today’s show, something special: a conversation we recorded live at our 13th Annual Symposium on “Building the Brain”. 

The event featured experts at the frontiers of brain development research asking questions like how much of our brain wiring is driven by genetics versus experience and whether we could use AI to understand the way infants naturally learn about the world around them. You can see some of these talks on our YouTube channel.

Each year at the Symposium we also host a fireside chat where leading Stanford researchers help us take a step back and look at the state of the field as a whole. 

This year, we collaborated with The Future of Everything podcast and its host, bioengineer Russ Altman, to bring that conversation to you. 

Russ spoke onstage with Karen Parker, who studies how our brains – and those of other primates – develop socially. She’s been studying how hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin are linked to differences in social cognition and the implications for children with autism, and she’s been working to translate these basic science findings to clinical trials.

Also on stage was Jason Yeatman, who studies how children learn to read and the challenges faced by kids with dyslexia. He’s developed online reading assessment tools and brought them to 1.2 million students at nearly 3,000 schools. 

While their individual work is different in approach, the conversation sheds light on the opportunities and obstacles researchers face in turning scientific discovery into real-world impact, whether in the clinic or the classroom.

Learn more:

• 2026 Wu Tsai Neuro Symposium: Building the Brain
• Parker Lab Social Neurosciences Research Program
• Yeatman’s Brain Development and Education Lab
• Rapid Online Assessment of Reading
• The Future of Everything
• Russ Altman
• ‘Our goal is to build bridges between the lab and the classroom’ | Stanford Report
• Reading-specific region differs in the dyslexic brain (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Potential autism biomarker found in babies (Stanford Medicine, 2020)
• Autism May Have ‘Unnoticed’ Driver, Say Stanford Neuroscientists (Newsweek, 2024)

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