A native of Chicago, Illinois, Caroline Robertson majored in neuroscience and behavior, with a focus on philosophy and ethics.  She worked as a research assistant at the University of Chicago while in high school and at Columbia and Cambridge while in college, and returned to Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen’s laboratory and the Autism Research Center as a PhD student at Cambridge, where she focuses on visual perception in autism.  “By targeting the neural circuitry underlying differences in autistic visual perception,” she wrote for the Gates-Cambridge website, “I hope to uncover the building blocks of higher-level autistic symptomatology, such as the commonly observed tendency to see the trees, but not the forest.”