Evaluating Police Training

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between police and autistic people.  Police officers and other first responders need training to respond appropriately.  When they do not, things get out of hand. 

Karlie A. Hinkle & Dorothea C. Lerman have an article at the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders titled  "Preparing Law Enforcement Officers to Engage Successfully with Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Evaluation of a Performance-Based Approach."  Abstract:

Law enforcement officers (LEOs) may use physical force unnecessarily or escalate problem behavior when attempting to gain the compliance of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Copenhaver & Tewksbury in American Journal of Criminal Justice 44:309–333, 2019). Although specialized training may remedy this problem, the relatively small literature on such training programs indicates the need for further research (Railey et al. in Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 2020). This study used simulations with actors to evaluate the outcomes of performance-based instruction on strategies to promote compliance when LEOs respond to calls involving individuals with ASD. Results for three LEOs and 24 police cadets demonstrated the efficacy of behavioral skills training (BST) for teaching LEOs how to interact more effectively with individuals with ASD. Results also suggested that hands-on training should supplement commonly used forms of didactic instruction.

From the article:

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to directly evaluate a brief hands-on training procedure to teach LEO’s specifc strategies for promoting compliance among individuals with ASD, particularly those with limited communication skills. It should be noted, however, that the training was evaluated within the context of simulations with actors, which may difer signifcantly from simulated interactions with individuals with ASD and from real-life encounters. Thus, future research should include individuals with ASD when evaluating the outcomes of group trainings.... Most notably, the experimenters did not collect data on the performance of the participants outside of the training facility or when they interacted with individuals with ASD, as noted previously. It is not clear whether the participants applied the targeted skills when encountering individuals with ASD or whether these skills maintained over time. Future research should examine generalization and maintenance of these skills to determine if more robust procedures are needed to promote use of the skills when needed and to determine the optimal frequency of refresher trainings

• Copenhaver, A., & Tewksbury, R. (2019). Interactions between autistic individuals and law enforcement: A mixed-methods exploratory study. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 44, 309–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-018-9452-8
• Railey, K. S., Love, A. M., & Campbell, J. M. (2020). A systematic review of law enforcement training related to autism spectrum disorder. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088357620922152

Shock, Rotenberg, and Autistic People

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

For those who remain at larger residential institutions, the horrors of yesteryear have generally ended. In 2012, however, a ten-year-old video surfaced, showing disturbing image of an electric shock device at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton Massachusetts. Staffers tied one student to a restraint board and shocked him 31 times over seven hours, ignoring his screamed pleas to stop. The Rotenberg Center is the only one in the nation that admits to using electric shocks on people with developmental disabilities, including autism. Center officials said that they had stopped using restraint boards but insisted that shocks were necessary in extreme cases to prevent officials insist the shock program is a last resort that prevents people with severe disorders from hurting themselves or others.

Recently, a federal appeals court overturned an FDA ban on the use of electric shock devices to correct aggressive or self-harming behavior. The Center said it will continue using them.

 Eric M. Garcia at The Independent:

Frequently, the press has framed parents who send their kids to a center like JRC as being loving advocates who know what’s best for their children. This is compounded by the fact that many autistic people subjected to shocks have intellectual disabilities, which means they are less likely to be taken seriously. As a result, the interests of parents are seen as synonymous with the needs of autistic and otherwise disabled people.

There is no doubt that parents can be good advocates for their kids. Throughout much of my travels while writing my book We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation, I met parents who were relentless in their pursuit of adequate services and who wanted to ensure their children were living a happy life. My own mother was also an indefatigable advocate for me when autism was less understood than it is now.

But it is naive to assume that all parents know exactly what their disabled offspring want or need.

Oftentimes, parents can be pressured into accepting the necessity of “treatments” like shock therapy, as the FDA reported in 2016. But even if parents are fully aware of the conditions, they still don’t have to live with the consequences of having shocks regularly administered to them.

...

' Unfortunately, what non-autistic people want for autistic people pervades every facet of policy, from research to treatment to employment opportunities. It’s becoming increasingly clear that that is not acceptable — and not helpful. Rather, the focus should be on what autistic people say they need, even if how they communicate is not considered conventional or easily understood.

GOP, Vaccines, and Science

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers. 

Aaaron Rupar at Vox:

To be clear, there are some responsible Republican voices urging people to get vaccinated. But the Trumpiest part of the GOP seems to be shifting from vaccine skepticism to outright hostility. At last week’s CPAC event in Dallas, for instance, attendees cheered when author Alex Berenson, a frequent Fox News guest who has built a reputation for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines, noted that the federal government is falling short of its vaccination goals.

...

Ironically, the people most hurt by the sort of anti-vax rhetoric that has become commonplace among GOP politicians are their own constituents. As political scientist Seth Masket recently detailed for the Denver Post, there’s a “remarkably strong” correlation between states that Biden won in 2020 and states that have vaccination rates above 70 percent. Along the same lines, NPR reported last month that “Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates,” and that “many of these states have high proportions of whites without college degrees.”

“To put it bluntly,” as my colleague German Lopez wrote, “polarization is killing people.”

This rhetoric and the effect it has had in plateauing vaccination rates in the US presents risks for everyone. Children under 12 are still unable to get vaccinated, preexisting conditions mean some groups of adults can’t be vaccinated or don’t get the full benefits of vaccines, and ongoing community spread in places like Tennessee presents more opportunities for the coronavirus to mutate into new and potentially more dangerous variants.

Instead of touting the successes of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed and the role it played in helping Moderna and Johnson & Johnson rapidly develop Covid vaccines, a loud and influential segment of the GOP has opted to try to persuade Trump supporters not to get vaccinated. And the developments in Tennessee indicate that this war against public health science won’t stop with the Covid vaccine.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

  Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in science, compared with 70% when Gallup last measured it more than four decades ago. The modest decline overall obscures more significant changes among political partisans. Republicans today are much less likely than their predecessors in 1975 to have confidence in science. Meanwhile, Democrats today have more confidence than their fellow partisans did in the past.

On the Stand

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between justice system and autistic people.

 Matthew Rosza at Salon:

"Stereotypes about neurodiversity that are grounded in the old 'deficit' view of the brain work against the individual," Thomas M. O'Toole, Ph.D., the president of and consultant at Sound Jury Consulting, LLC, told Salon by email. "We live in a post-truth world where our beliefs and experiences serve as powerful filters for what we accept as true, and unfortunately, this means those stereotypes could work against a neurodiverse party in a lawsuit if the stereotypes give jurors a shortcut to doing the hard work of sorting through the case details."

...

[Haley] Moss elaborated on the challenges facing neurodivergent individuals when they interact with our legal system.

"Think about how your average person or reasonable person hears narratives about neurodiversity," Moss explained. "They see what they see in the media and how media sometimes gets it wrong. They might hear somebody testify and they think that this person isn't acting in the way that they should." Whether they don't get their words straight, they fidget and get nervous, they swim (engage in self-stimulating behaviors) on the stand or have a flat affect, "a juror might think, 'I think they're lying,' even though they're just trying to regulate their attention."

A Looming Disaster in Tennessee

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers. 

A couple of years ago, a Tennessee official pushed back hard when Rep.-elect Mark Green (R) pushed the myth.  Times have changed.

Aaron Blake at WP:

For about as long as certain Republicans and conservative figures have questioned the safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines, those people have offered a disclaimer: They’re not “anti-vaxxers,” they’re just asking questions. And asking questions is valid. But those questions often devolved well into conspiracy theorizing and claiming the vaccine effort was something that it wasn’t, using dodgy data and innuendo that had the predictable result of making about half of Republicans say they aren’t getting the shot. And they did so with little pushback from pro-vaccine Republicans.

On Tuesday came perhaps the biggest example of where this often careless vaccine skepticism can lead. Tennessee’s Department of Health is reportedly going to stop not just encouraging minors to get the coronavirus vaccine, but also informing them about that vaccine — or any other vaccines.

...

This has been lurking beneath the surface for a long time. Former president Donald Trump before he became president repeatedly cited debunked links between vaccines and autism. GOP officials like Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) have also cast doubt on vaccines for children, with Stitt saying he didn’t get vaccinations for some of his children.

Until about a year ago, this was a much more bipartisan issue, with reservations about vaccination spanning from well-to-do West Coast liberals to more anti-government conservatives. What has transpired since then has been the anti-vaccine movement blowing up more on the right than the left, despite Trump having claimed credit for the production of the vaccine during his administration.

 

GOP officials in TN didn't want older teenagers to know they could be vaccinated without parental consent. Under pressure, the state health dept. removed posts telling teens they were eligible. And TN's vaccine chief says she was fired over the issue. https://t.co/b3AUHwC2R7

— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) July 13, 2021

More IDEA Money

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

A July 1 release from the Department of Education:

The U.S. Department of Education today released more than $3 billion in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to states to support infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities. The new funding will help aid more than 7.9 million infants, toddlers, and students served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and adds to the ARP Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief allocation of $122 billion in state funding for K-12 schools, which the department announced in March.

...

In addition to releasing the funds, the Department of Education released a fact sheet describing how IDEA funds within ARP can be used by states to support infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities.

Today’s more than $3 billion in funds were allocated within Section 2014(a) of the ARP and will add to IDEA’s three major formula grants programs:

• $2.6 billion for IDEA Part B Grants to States (Section 611) for children and youth with disabilities aged 3 through 21.
• $200 million for IDEA Part B Preschool Grants (Section 619) for children with disabilities aged 3 through 5.
• $250 million for IDEA Part C Grants for infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families.

The Department’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) will administer and monitor the ARP section 2014(a) funds to states and other designated agencies. In general, these awards are subject to the same requirements under IDEA and the Uniform Guidance as all IDEA funds.

The table below outlines the amount of funding each state educational agency or designated agency received from the ARP section 2014(a).

Total ARP-IDEA Award

U.S. Total	$3,030,000,000
Alabama	$43,837,038
Alaska	$10,484,939
Arizona	$52,881,982
Arkansas	$31,173,397
California	$301,065,500
Colorado	$44,600,239
Connecticut	$31,553,398
Delaware	$10,397,813
Florida	$174,928,954
Georgia	$95,169,834
Hawaii	$11,210,995
Idaho	$15,541,956
Illinois	$120,069,770
Indiana	$70,121,609
Iowa	$29,012,184
Kansas	$29,387,261
Kentucky	$45,460,922
Louisiana	$47,458,231
Maine	$13,711,111
Maryland	$53,968,575
Massachusetts	$66,839,596
Michigan	$93,819,210
Minnesota	$52,337,313
Mississippi	$28,613,338
Missouri	$53,500,699
Montana	$10,459,693
Nebraska	$17,905,922
Nevada	$20,454,662
New Hampshire	$11,735,240
New Jersey	$85,056,957
New Mexico	$21,487,182
New York	$184,105,112
North Carolina	$93,642,460
North Dakota	$8,532,200
Ohio	$106,186,824
Oklahoma	$39,910,634
Oregon	$34,911,719
Pennsylvania	$104,594,502
Rhode Island	$11,030,553
South Carolina	$48,572,100
South Dakota	$10,392,717
Tennessee	$64,293,445
Texas	$275,164,024
Utah	$30,158,820
Vermont	$8,316,669
Virginia	$77,485,578
Washington	$61,695,668
West Virginia	$18,554,908
Wisconsin	$50,733,932
Wyoming	$8,744,502
District of Columbia	$5,603,800
Puerto Rico	$31,713,834

NOTE: For information on IDEA ARP funding to the Department of the Interior, Outlying Areas (American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and other IDEA ARP funding (State Incentive Grants and Technical Assistance), please visit: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/speced/leg/arp/index.html.

Antivax Monday

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers. 

Tiffany Hsu at NYT:

Opposition to vaccines was once relegated to the fringes of American politics, and the rhetoric on Fox News has coincided with efforts by right-wing extremists to bash vaccination efforts.

Served up to an audience that is more likely than the general population to be wary of Covid vaccines, the remarks by Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham echoed a now-common conservative talking point — that the government-led effort to raise vaccination rates amounted to a violation of civil liberties and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

The comments by the Fox News hosts and their guests may have also helped cement vaccine skepticism in the conservative mainstream, even as the Biden administration’s campaign to inoculate the public is running into resistance in many parts of the country.

 Caitlin Owens at Axios:

State Republican lawmakers around the country are pushing bills — at least one of which has become law — that would give unvaccinated people the same protections as those surrounding race, gender and religion.

Why it matters: These bills would tie the hands of private businesses that want to protect their employees and customers. But they also show how deep into the political psyche resistance to coronavirus vaccine requirements has become, and how vaccination status has rapidly become a marker of identity.
...
Zoom in: Montana has made it illegal to "discriminate" on the basis of vaccine status, with some exceptions within the health care sector.

• The law prohibits businesses, governmental entities and places of "public accommodation" — like grocery stores, hotels or restaurants — from refusing to serve or withholding goods from anyone based on their vaccination status or whether they have an "immunity passport."
• Employers aren't allowed to discriminate against or refuse to employ someone based on the same criteria.
• “This is a civil rights statute. It absolutely is," Bagley said. "What this law is saying is that a restriction directed at the unvaccinated is prohibited in the same way as you'd be prohibited from putting up a sign saying, 'no Irish admitted.'"

Noting that the government is falling short of its Covid vaccine goals is an applause line at CPAC Dallas pic.twitter.com/og9Fw1MRAv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 10, 2021

Boebert: We’re here to tell government we don’t want your benefits. We don’t want your welfare… pic.twitter.com/Gk8WenGrls

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 10, 2021

Program for Autistic Students at Marquette

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the spectrum. Some colleges and universities have programs to assist them.  At Crux, John Lavenburg writes of a program at Marquette:

Entering its third year, On Your Marq was created as an interdisciplinary approach to help university students on the autism spectrum navigate college life. In the program’s first year it served five students. The number has since tripled to 16 for the upcoming academic year.

Each student in the program has a peer mentor and graduate coach. Emily Raclaw, the program’s director, described the peer mentor as sort of a social navigator for the students. The graduate coach, she said, checks-in with the students about their mental/emotional health and advises them academically.

The program also holds a seminar each semester that utilizes the university’s occupational therapy department, rehab counseling program and graduate staff to talk with the students about different social and employment skills. Marquette professors, the housing department, career services and the writing center are others it works with.

“Pretty much everywhere on campus our students have someone they can go to or someone they can talk to that’s going to understand them and not treat them like they’re weird because they’re different because they’re not,” Raclaw told Crux. “They’re different, not less.”

Hari Srinivasan

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee and research priorities.

First nonspeaking autistic to be on IACC I think.
Look forward to contributing. https://t.co/KUQFlMRMLi

— Hari Srinivasan (@HariSri108) July 8, 2021

The IACC :

Mr. Hari Srinivasan is a minimally speaking autistic student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Psychology with a minor in Disability Studies, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest academic honor society. As a recently selected Haas Scholar at UC Berkeley, Mr. Srinivasan will be carrying out a year-long research project to improve the coping toolbox for autistics. Mr. Srinivasan is the lead student instructor for a weekly class on autism, creating and teaching content that covers a myriad of issues across the lifespan. As a student journalist at The Daily Californian, he has written over 50 articles on both disability and non-disability topics. He heads Team Propaganda at the UC Berkeley Disability Lab, which hacks low cost solutions for a wide range of disabilities. He has been a research assistant at the university Psychology Labs on projects related to mental health, ADHD, and sleep. He also served as the first non-speaking autistic student president of the campus organization Autism: Spectrum at Cal, stressing the idea of autism needing to go beyond mere Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion and towards Belonging. His other affiliations include Board member and Whistleblower Compliance Officer for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Council of Autistic Advisors for the Autism Society of America, and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University.

People Will Die Because of GOP Antivaxxers

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.  Recent examples include a member of the House COVID subcommittee and a crackpot who is seeking the party's US Senate nomination in Ohio.

Aaron Blake at WP:

It has been three days since President Biden announced an initiative to send people door-to-door trying to get more people vaccinated, and Republicans and their conservative media allies have wasted no time turning those door-knockers into terrifying straw men.

To be clear, there are valid questions about whether this is a good idea or the best use of government resources. But the pushback from some portions of the right has been swift and often over the top — to the point where it could very logically lead to some ugly scenes.

Republican members of Congress and conservative talkers have wrongly pitched the effort as forced vaccination — even repeatedly invoking the Nazis — and lodged baseless suggestions that it would be done using illegally obtained medical information. Others have suggested it’s something akin to government coercion or even a precursor to gun confiscation.

We know relatively little about the nascent effort thus far, but what we do know bears little to no resemblance to these allegations.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) got the ball rolling Tuesday by comparing the effort to “medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took to Twitter the next day to offer her own Nazi comparison, labeling the door-knockers “needle Nazis.”

Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

All of this is having an effect. As NPR reports, “There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates.”

Some of the least vaccinated states are the most pro-Trump. Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates. Many of these states have high proportions of whites without college degrees.

The irony is that many of those who now deride the vaccines also objected to lockdowns, social distancing, and the wearing of masks. In a rational world, they would see the vaccines as a ticket back to normal life.

Instead, at this moment, they have chosen to go full anti-vax. Even with hundreds of thousands of dead, and hospitals again filling up, the lies continue; media types tell them to get clicks and likes; pols spread the lies to raise their profile and bring in cash.

And their recklessness will kill people. This is not hyperbole.

The toll of the lies —the tweets, cable hits, and performative demagoguery — can be measured in human lives. The right’s burst of dishonesty means that more fathers, mothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, even children will die.

IACC Public Members

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee and research priorities.

From IACC:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the appointments of new and returning members to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a federal advisory committee reauthorized under the Autism Collaboration, Accountability, Research, Education, and Support (CARES) Act of 2019. The IACC is a federal advisory committee composed of public stakeholders and federal officials that coordinates federal activities concerning autism spectrum disorder and provides advice to the HHS Secretary on issues related to autism. Committee meetings serve as a public forum for the sharing of community perspectives and concerns about autism. The committee uses this input as it formulates advice and recommendations for the HHS Secretary on matters related to autism research, services, and policy. The committee's responsibilities include developing and annually updating the IACC Strategic Plan for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and preparing an annual Summary of Advances in ASD Research.

After an open call to the public for nominations of individuals to serve on the committee, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, J.D., appointed 20 new and two returning public members to the IACC to provide him with advice to advance research, enhance services, and increase opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. The committee also includes 23 new and returning federal officials representing key federal agencies and departments that serve the autism community across a wide variety of areas, including biomedical research, healthcare, education, and social services. Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health, will continue to serve as the chair of the committee. The first meeting of the new committee will take place virtually on July 21-22, 2021 and will be open to the public via webcast. A full roster and biosketches of all the new and returning members can be viewed on the IACC website.

IACC Executive Secretary, Susan Daniels, Ph.D., stated, "We are excited to welcome the largest and most diverse IACC to date, with a wider representation of perspectives from across the autism community than ever before."

Public members appointed include autism self-advocates, parents and family members of children and adults on the autism spectrum, clinicians, researchers, and leaders of autism research, services, and advocacy organizations. Many of the appointed individuals serve multiple roles, such as parent and researcher or self-advocate and leader of an advocacy organization. Appointees hail from across the U.S., including states that have not been represented on the committee previously, such as Louisiana, Maine, Texas, Washington, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

Autism and disability organizations represented by new and returning appointees to the IACC include the Autism Science Foundation, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Autism Speaks, Champions Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Madison House Autism Foundation. Four federal departments newly joining the IACC —the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Labor, and U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs—will provide additional expertise in the critical areas of housing, employment, interactions with law enforcement, and care for veterans on the autism spectrum.

Public members appointed by the Secretary to serve on the IACC from 2021-2024 are:

• Maria Mercedes Avila, Ph.D., M.S.W., M.Ed.Associate ProfessorDepartment of PediatricsLarner College of MedicineUniversity of VermontBurlington, Vermont
• Alice Carter, Ph.D.ProfessorDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of Massachusetts Boston
• Samantha Crane, J.D.Legal DirectorAutistic Self Advocacy NetworkWashington, D.C.
• Aisha Dickerson, Ph.D.Assistant ProfessorDepartment of EpidemiologyBloomberg School of Public HealthJohns Hopkins UniversityBaltimore, Maryland
• Dena Gassner, M.S.W.Ph.D. Candidate in Social WorkAdelphi UniversityWest Hempstead, New York
• Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, M.A.Humanities ScholarCenter for the Study of Women, Gender, and SexualityRice UniversityHouston, Texas
• Alycia Halladay, Ph.D.Chief Science OfficerAutism Science FoundationNew York, New York
• Craig Johnson, B.A.Founder and PresidentChampions FoundationHouston, Texas
• Yetta Myrick, B.A.Founder and PresidentDC Autism ParentsWashington, D.C.
• Lindsey Nebeker, B.A.Freelance Presenter/TrainerAlexandria, Virginia
• Valerie Paradiz, Ph.D.Vice PresidentServices and SupportsAutism SpeaksPrinceton, New Jersey
• Jenny Mai Phan, Ph.D.Post-Doctoral FellowWaisman CenterUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
• Joseph Piven, M.D.Thomas E. Castelloe Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and PediatricsUniversity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
• JaLynn R. Prince, B.F.A.Co-Founder, President, and ChairMadison House Autism FoundationRockville, Maryland
• Susan Rivera, Ph.D.Professor and ChairDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of California, Davis
• Matthew Siegel, M.D.Vice President of Medical AffairsDevelopmental Disorders Service LineMaine Behavioral HealthcareWestbrook, Maine
• Ivanova Smith, B.A.Self-Advocate FacultyLeadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related DisabilitiesUniversity of WashingtonTacoma, Washington
• Hari SrinivasanStudentUniversity of California, Berkeley
• Helen Tager-Flusberg, Ph.D.ProfessorDepartment of Psychological and Brain SciencesBoston UniversityBoston, Massachusetts
• Julie Lounds Taylor, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of PediatricsVanderbilt University Medical CenterNashville, Tennessee
• Paul Wang, M.D.Deputy DirectorClinical Research Associates, LLCSimons FoundationNew York, New York
• Stephen Whitlow, J.D.Executive DirectorTransition ServicesMerakeyBaton Rouge, Louisiana

The autistic members of @IACC_Autism are: @lauralovesian1, @MorenikeGO, @LindseyNebeker, @HariSri108, @Samanticka, Dena Gassner, and Valerie Paradiz. That’s also a pretty broad ideological spread, with a lot of different expertise coming to the table.

— Sara Luterman (@slooterman) July 7, 2021