WJohann Friedrich Karl Asperger was an Austrian pediatrician, eugenicist, medical theorist, and medical professor for whom Asperger syndrome is named. He is best known for his early studies on mental disorders, specifically in children. His work was largely unnoticed during his lifetime except for a few accolades in Vienna, and his studies on psychological disorders acquired world renown only posthumously. He wrote over 300 publications, mostly concerning a condition he termed autistic psychopathy (AP).
WSimon Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mind-blindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. However, critics have suggested that his views on autism and sex differences are controversial.
WLauretta Bender was an American child neuropsychiatrist known for developing the Bender-Gestalt Test, a psychological test designed to evaluate visual-motor maturation in children. First published by Bender in 1938, the test became widely used for assessing children's neurological function and screening for developmental disorders.
WGeir Bjørklund is a researcher and medical/health science writer, and editor. He is founder and president of the Council for Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (CONEM), an international non-profit association based in Norway, engaged in research related to toxic metals, autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and autism. Bjørklund is a member of the World Association of Medical Editors.
WAlfred Brauner was an Austrian-born French scholar, author, sociologist and child psychologist, who was a volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and an Austrian Resistance member during Occupied France. He has devoted his life to educating refugee, displaced and maladjusted children, participating in the welcoming of Jewish child survivors of the Kristallnacht and of the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz from 1939 to 1946. An early writer on infantile autism, he also pioneered the analysis of children's drawings in war, creating from 1937 the first collection of drawing-testimonials to offer a unique perspective of the major conflicts of the 20th century through the eyes of children.
WFrançoise Brauner, born Fritzi Erna Riesel was an Austrian-born French pediatrician and child psychiatrist who was part of the medical contingent of International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and was an Austrian Resistance member during Occupied France. She has devoted her medical career to educating refugee, displaced and maladjusted children, participating in the welcoming of Jewish child survivors of the Kristallnacht and of the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Auschwitz from 1939 to 1946 and working on autism in France since 1956. She also pioneered the analysis of children's drawings in war, creating from 1937 the first collection of drawing-testimonials to offer a unique perspective of the major conflicts of the 20th century through the eyes of children.
WJames Robert Cade was an American physician, university professor, research scientist and inventor. Cade, a native of Texas, earned his bachelor and medical degrees at the University of Texas, and became a professor of medicine and nephrology at the University of Florida. Although Cade engaged in many areas of medical research, he is most widely remembered as the leader of the research team that created the sports drink Gatorade. Gatorade would have significant medical applications for treating dehydration in patients, and has generated over $150 million in royalties for the university.
WManuel F. Casanova is the SmartState Endowed Chair in Childhood Neurotherapeutics and a professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville. He is a former Gottfried and Gisela Kolb Endowed Chair in Outpatient Psychiatry and a Professor of Anatomical Sciences and Neurobiology at the University of Louisville.
WRichard Carlton Deth, Ph.D., is a neuropharmacologist, a professor of pharmacology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is on the scientific advisory board of the National Autism Association. Deth has published scientific studies on the role of D4 dopamine receptors in psychiatric disorders, as well as the book, Molecular Origins of Human Attention: The Dopamine-Folate Connection. He has also become a prominent voice in the controversies in autism and thiomersal and vaccines, due to his hypothesis that certain children are more at risk than others because they lack the normal ability to excrete neurotoxic metals.
WMichael Fitzgerald is an Irish professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, specialising in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As of June 2005, he said he had diagnosed over 900 individuals with Asperger syndrome.
WUta Frith is a German developmental psychologist working at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She has pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia, and has written several books on the two subjects arguing for autism to be considered a mental condition rather than being caused by parenting. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduces the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited for creating the Sally-Anne test along with fellow scientist Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. She also pioneered the work with child dyslexia. Among the students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
WMady Hornig is an American psychiatrist and an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. A physician-scientist, her research involves clinical, epidemiological, and animal model research on autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions. She directs the clinical core of an international investigation of the role of Borna disease virus in human mental illness and participates as a key investigator for the Autism Birth Cohort (ABC) project, a large prospective epidemiological study, based in Norway, that is identifying how genes and timing interact with environmental agents preceding the onset of autism spectrum diagnoses. In 2006, she was appointed as Guest Professor at the School of Basic Medical Science of Beijing University in Beijing, China.
WPatricia Howlin is Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, whose principal research interests focus on autism and developmental disorders including Williams syndrome, developmental language disorders and Fragile X.
WMarcel Just is D. O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research uses brain imaging (fMRI) in high-level cognitive tasks to study the neuroarchitecture of cognition. Just's areas of expertise include psycholinguistics, object recognition, and autism, with particular attention to cognitive and neural substrates. Just directs the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging and is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU.
WLeo Kanner was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, physician, and social activist best known for his work related to autism. Before working at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kanner practiced as a physician in Germany and in South Dakota. In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who were highly intelligent but displayed "a powerful desire for aloneness" and "an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness." He named their condition "early infantile autism," which is now known as autism spectrum disorder. Kanner was in charge of developing the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States and later served as the Chief of Child Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is one of the co-founders of The Children's Guild, a nonprofit organization serving children, families and child-serving organizations throughout Maryland and Washington, D.C., and dedicated to “Transforming how America Cares for and Educates its Children and Youth.” He is widely considered one of the most influential American psychiatrists of the 20th century.
WStephanie Mitelman Bercovitch is a sex education and family life education professor, public speaker, entrepreneur, sex educator, and author specializing in special education, particularly for youth with autism spectrum disorders. She is the owner and creator of Senseez Pillows, a company making vibrating pillows for people with sensory needs, and Sex Ed Mart, a sex education publishing and distribution company specializing in sex education for youth with special needs. Bercovitch also runs a private sex education practice for youth on the autism spectrum, their parents, and couples who are neurologically diverse.
WLuc Antoine Montagnier is a French virologist and joint recipient, with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen, of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He has worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
WPaul H. Patterson was a neuroscientist and the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
WTheo Peeters was a Belgian neurolinguist who specialised in autism spectrum disorders. During his career he emphasised the importance of understanding the "culture of autism", of empathising fully with individuals on the spectrum. He was the founder of the Opleidingscentrum Autisme in Antwerp, Belgium.
WMartin Charles Raff CBE FRS FMedSci is a Canadian/British biologist and researcher who is an Emeritus Professor at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB) at University College London (UCL). His research has been in immunology, cell biology, and developmental neurobiology.
WVilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran is an Indian-American neuroscientist. Ramachandran is known for his wide-ranging experiments and theories in behavioral neurology, including the invention of the mirror box. He is a Distinguished Professor in UCSD's Department of Psychology, where he is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition.
WHarold "Hackie" Stuart Reitman, M.D. is an American orthopedic surgeon, former professional boxer, entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist. He is the founder and CEO of Different Brains. Reitman fought as a professional heavyweight boxer while working full-time as an orthopedic surgeon, and was widely referred to as the Boxing Doctor during his career.
WBernard Rimland was an American research psychologist, writer, lecturer, and influential person in the field of developmental disorders. Rimland's first book, Infantile Autism, sparked by the birth of a son who had autism, was instrumental in changing attitudes toward the disorder. Rimland founded and directed two advocacy groups: the Autism Society of America (ASA) and the Autism Research Institute. He promoted several since disproven theories about the causes and treatment of autism, including vaccine denial, facilitated communication, chelation therapy, and false claims of a link between secretin and autism. He also supported the ethically controversial practice of using aversives on autistic children.
WEdward Ross Ritvo was an American psychiatrist known for his research on genetic components of autism. He was a professor emeritus of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute.
WStephen Wayne "Steve" Scherer is a Canadian scientist who studies genetic variation in human disease. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto under Professor Lap-chee Tsui. Together they founded Canada's first human genome centre, the Centre for Applied Genomics (TCAG) at the Hospital for Sick Children. He continues to serve as director of TCAG, and is also director of the McLaughlin Centre at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine.
WHoward C. Shane is director of the Autism Language Program and Communication Enhancement Program at Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, former director of the Institute on Applied Technology, and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is internationally known for his research and development of augmented and alternative communication systems to support the communication needs of people with neuromuscular disorders, autism and other disabilities.
WVijendra Kumar Singh is a neuroimmunologist who formerly held a post at Utah State University, prior to which he was a professor at the University of Michigan. While affiliated with both institutions, he conducted some controversial autism-related research focusing on the potential role of immune system disorders in the etiology of autism. For example, he has testified before a US congressional committee that, in his view, "three quarters of autistic children suffer from an autoimmune disease."
WThomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist and is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
WGrunya Efimovna Sukhareva was a Soviet child psychiatrist. She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. The original paper was in Russian and published in German a year later. Sula Wolff translated it in 1996 for the English-speaking world.
WNikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in animals. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behavior.
WJohn Walker-Smith is a gastroenterologist well known for his work in pediatrics. From 1985 until his retirement in 2001, he was professor of pediatric gastroenterology at the University of London. He also formerly served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.
WDonna Leanne Williams, also known by her married name Donna Leanne Samuel, was an Australian writer, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter and sculptor.
WLorna Gladys Wing, was an English psychiatrist. She was a pioneer in the field of childhood developmental disorders who advanced understanding of autism worldwide, introduced the term Asperger syndrome in 1976 and was involved in founding the National Autistic Society (NAS) in the UK.