1. Manuel Casanova is a former Gottfried and Gisela Kolb Endowed Chair in Outpatient Psychiatry and a Professor of Anatomical Sciences and Neurobiology at the University of Louisville.
22 Facts About Manuel Casanova
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Cristina Casanova Might is the Founder and President of the NGLY1 Foundation and the Executive Director at the Undiagnosed Diseases Network Foundation.
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Manuel Casanova is married to Emily Casanova, a research assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville who studies autism genetics, the evolution of susceptibility genes in rare disorders, and is a patient advocate for the Ehlers-Danlos community.
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Manuel Casanova's son-in-law is Matt Might, director of the Hugh Kaul Personalized Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama Birmingham.
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Manuel Casanova earned his medical degree from the University of Puerto Rico.
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Manuel Casanova then completed clinical and research fellowships at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, including three years in neuropathology, where he was in-charge of pediatric neuropathology, which was when his interest in developmental disorders of the brain arose.
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Manuel Casanova subsequently helped establish two brain banks, the Johns Hopkins Brain Resource Center and the Brain Bank Unit of the Clinical Brains Disorders Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health.
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Manuel Casanova spent several years as a deputy medical examiner for Washington, DC, where he gained experience with the postmortem examination of sudden infant death syndrome and child abuse, which was when he began publishing extensively on postmortem techniques, including neuronal morphometry immunocytochemistry, neurochemistry, and autoradiography.
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Manuel Casanova worked as a consultant and was staff neuropathologist at Sinai Hospital in Maryland, the North Charles Hospital, and the DC General Hospital.
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Manuel Casanova is a former lieutenant commander in the US Public Health Service.
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Manuel Casanova's interest has gradually come to focus on abnormalities of cortical neurocircuitry, in particular on the cell minicolumn, a vertical conglomerate of eighty to one hundred neurons that have in common a latency of response to stimulation.
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Manuel Casanova has reported interhemispheric differences in the morphometry of minicolumns that could provide explanations for the speciation of hominids.
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Manuel Casanova claimed this helps explain symptoms since "there's not enough juice to actually power very long connections in the brain".
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Manuel Casanova has been studying the autonomic nervous system in autistic individuals.
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Manuel Casanova found that the sympathetic branch of the ANS is overactive in autistic children, which leads to higher levels of anxiety.
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Manuel Casanova has stated that most of the neurodiversity movement is based on the good intention to destigmatize autism, but some of their scientific arguments are questionable.
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Manuel Casanova sees many other positives in the movement, such as the desire for acceptance and accommodations.
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Manuel Casanova additionally claimed that until recently, the neurodiversity movement wilfully neglected the roles of Leo Kanner and Bernard Rimland in advocating for accommodations, claiming that they were ignored because those individuals wanted medical treatments for autism.
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Manuel Casanova has claimed that Neurotribes by Steve Silberman was unfairly weighted against Leo Kanner.
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Manuel Casanova has written against Silberman's apparent perspective that Hans Asperger, one of the first autism researchers, should be forgiven for his involvement in the Nazi regime.
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One article from WAVE 3 claimed that Manuel Casanova wanted to wipe out autism entirely when he said that was not true.
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Additionally, a Newsweek article claimed that Manuel Casanova received death threats from writing about autism, but this actually happened because some autistic individuals falsely thought he wanted to wipe out autism based on the WAVE 3 article.