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Michelle Trudeau

Michelle Trudeau began her radio career in 1981, filing stories for NPR from Beijing and Shanghai, China, where she and her husband lived for two years. She began working as a science reporter and producer for NPR's Science Desk since 1982. Trudeau's news reports and feature stories, which cover the areas of human behavior, child development, the brain sciences, and mental health, air on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Trudeau has been the recipient of more than twenty media broadcasting awards for her radio reporting, from such professional organizations as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Casey Journalism Center, the American Psychiatric Association, World Hunger, the Los Angeles Press Club, the American Psychological Association, and the National Mental Health Association.

Trudeau is a graduate of Stanford University. While at Stanford, she studied primate behavior and conducted field research with Dr. Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania. Prior to coming to NPR, Trudeau worked as a Research Associate at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C.

Trudeau now lives in Southern California, the mother of twins.

  • People with extraordinary autobiographical memories also tend to have obsessive tendencies, researchers are learning. Brain scans reveal structural differences in the brains of these people, including a larger-than-normal caudate, a brain area linked to OCD.
  • A new study in the journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence isn't fixed — that it can grow and increase — they do better in school.
  • A high-tech machine that monitors infants' brain cells as they listen to speech reveals a key element in how babies go from hearing sounds to speaking them.
  • Neurobiologist James McGaugh, one of the world's experts on human memory, says that a woman he calls AJ has a one-of-a-kind memory. In an interview with NPR, she talks about what life is like for someone who can remember things she’s done and news events from almost every day of her life for the past 25 years. Her life is like a split-screen movie, with the past running almost as vividly as the present.
  • Neurobiologist James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how human memory works. In the current issue of the journal Neurocase, McGaugh reports on a woman with the astonishing ability to clearly remember events that happened to her decades ago.
  • Children whose mothers are depressed are themselves at increased risk for depression, anxiety disorder, or other mental-health problems during childhood. New research shows that treating the depression of mothers can significantly alleviate children's depression.
  • For about 10 percent of people with severe depression, no available treatments work -- not anti-depressant medicines, not psychotherapy, not even electro-shock therapy. Now a revolutionary treatment that entails brain surgery shows preliminary promise in treating intractable depression.
  • He's won the American Teacher Award, been awarded the National Medal of Arts, and made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire. For 24 years, Rafe Esquith has taught at an inner city school in Los Angeles, inspiring his fifth graders to excel far beyond the low expectations often placed on poor, immigrant children.
  • Magnetic resonance imaging reveals that the parts of the brain used to perceive an object overlap with those used to imagine that object. The test is the first to reveal the biological basis for the persistence of memories that never really happened. NPR's Michelle Trudeau reports.
  • A new study finds an intriguing reason why boys born prematurely are at a greater risk for developmental and cognitive problems than girls. Premature boys, by age 8, have less white matter -- the material that allows different parts of the brain to communicate with each other. NPR's Michelle Trudeau reports.

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