Matthew Belmonte is a research scientist with the Com DEALL Trust, Bangalore, reader in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, UK, and brother and uncle to two people with autism. His research in India, England, and the United States has asked what makes the difference between family members with and without autism, and also what underlies their many similarities. Belmonte helped establish the theory of abnormal brain connectivity in autism, has related prerequisite skills such as attentional and sensorimotor control to the emergence of social communication, and currently leads a project applying motor skills training to support development of communicative skills. His broader interests concern how interactions within and between brain networks covary with autistic cognitive traits, psychological distance and level of construal, sex and gender, and culture; and how these individual and cultural differences may point the way to patient-centred therapeutic strategies. After reading computer science and English literature as an undergraduate at Cornell University and postgraduate study in neuroscience at the University of California San Diego, Belmonte completed an MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, a PhD in behavioural neuroscience at Boston University, and postdoctoral study at the University of Cambridge. He has served as adjunct lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assistant professor at Cornell University, and visiting professor at the National Brain Research Centre (India), as well as on the editorial board of Autism Research and currently on the editorial board of Molecular Autism. He is a founding member of the International Society for Autism Research.