It’s hard to believe we have been covering INSAR, the annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research, for fifteen years. The autism research landscape, being expansive and varied, both has and has… not evolved during that stretch to focus on the needs of existing autistic people, and their families. (It should be noted […]
Scientists have expressed concerns about last week’s meeting of the newest Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), raising questions about the meeting’s content, process and impact on future U.S. federal funding for autism research. “The day was slightly unhinged,” says David Mandell, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and former […]
AutINSAR is an online and in-person discussion about autistic priorities in autism research. It began at the 2017 INSAR International Society for Autism Research meeting in San Francisco, as a frustrated community response to INSAR’s chronic neglect of existing autistic priorities and needs. Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism now co-hosts the AutINSAR chat each time […]
This collection of personal experiences attending conferences, authored by Xavier Penn, explores what’s still going wrong in autism research. Content note: Discussion of involuntary psychiatric holds and self-injury Introduction: Oral Sessions I phrase my questions achingly, cautiously, edit after edit, before it’s time to (shakingly) press play. The second evening someone says enthusiastically, “You know, […]
Autism in Kenya, organoid research: In this week’s roundup, check out several papers on autism-linked genes, including PTEN, MECP2 and SYNGAP1. The list also includes a new paper documenting the prevalence of neurodevelopmental conditions in Kenya, co-authored by Amina Abubakar, who was featured in a Transmitter profile earlier this year. More autism research we spotted:
The following is a personal essay that reflects the opinion of its author. November 24, 2025 U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has never attended medical school. He has no prior experience in formulating public health policy and no training in neurodevelopmental disorders. His opinions on the causes of autism have […]
This collection of Spectrum articles from the past 12 months highlights expert perspectives on autism’s heritability and its link to biological sex, the value of transdiagnostic frameworks, and the field’s future, among other topics.
Autism research is highly focused on causation and autism “treatments,” areas most autistic people neither benefit from nor want studied. Enter AutINSAR, a much-needed discussion between autistic people, autism researchers, family members, and professionals about priorities in autism research. This year’s AutINSAR chat took place during INSAR 2025, the annual meeting of the International Society […]
When COVID-19 shut down labs worldwide, Jordan Farrell, then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, faced a dilemma. His work on the distinct roles of dentate spikes and sharp wave ripples in the hippocampus demanded extensive neural recordings from multiple brain regions simultaneously—a daunting experimental setup in the best of times and nearly impossible during […]
Program will estimate costs needed for Common Start legislation (H. 605 / P. 362) A UMass Boston-based interdisciplinary team of researchers has launched a new research project that will build a cost simulator to inform policy recommendations around universal child care. The simulator will model the amount of funding required by the Common Start legislation […]
Zachary J Williams MD/PhD college studentVanderbilt University When Zachary Williams joined the Autistic Researchers Committee of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), he that knew one of the group’s priorities would be to promote participatory research — an approach in which scientists work with autistic people and other members of the autism community to […]
“So, have you found any autism in Africa?” the wealthy philanthropist asked, peering over his wine glass. It was 2012, and Petrus de Vries had just returned to South Africa after 20 years abroad. The University of Cape Town, where he had been hired to set up an autism research center, was hosting a cocktail […]
