Associate Professor of Medical Psychology
Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Amy Margolis is Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Director of the Environment, Brain, and Behavior Lab, and Director of the Columbia Psychology, Psychiatry, and Public Health Collaborative Learning Disability Innovation Hub funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She holds a doctorate in Applied Educational Psychology: School psychology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University and is trained as a clinical neuropsychologist with two decades of experience assessing and treating children with learning and attention disorders. She serves as Principal Investigator on three federally funded projects that use magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography in longitudinal birth cohorts to study the effects of prenatal exposure to neurotoxicants on brain and behavior outcomes. Her research focuses on identifying neural correlates of environmentally-associated reading and math problems in children living in the context of economic disadvantage as well as environmentally-associated phenotypes of attention, substance use, and thought problems. In complementary work, Dr. Margolis has established the prevalence, etiology, pathophysiology, and treatment of nonverbal learning disability (NVLD), which differentiates children with deficits in visual-spatial reasoning from those with language-based (verbal) learning problems. She published the first population estimate of NVLD, placing rates at 3 percent in North American youth, and the first functional MRI studies of NVLD, linking brain alterations with functional impairments in youth with NVLD. She has authored two books, over 60 peer-reviewed papers, and served as text reviser for the Specific Learning Disorder chapter of DSM5-TR and Co-Chair of the ECHO Neurodevelopment Working Group.
