This project began as my undergraduate honors thesis. It considers how non-autistic college students’ interest in interacting with peers is impacted by the peers’ social behavior and special interests. You can read the first paper from this study in my Publications section!
This project is funded through UVA's Directors of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion small grants program and focuses on understanding how UVA could be more supportive of and accessible to autistic students.
This project focuses on understanding (1) what labels people with a connection to autism prefer and (2) how particular labels may contribute to or reduce the stigmatization of people who have a diagnosis of autism.
Background: Labeling an individual can influence the inferences others make about them. For example, using a face-inversion paradigm, Civile et al. (2018) found the difference between memory for upright vs. inverted faces was larger for faces labeled “regular people” than those labeled “diagnosed with autism.
I am a collaborator on an international project developing training to improve faculty and graduate teaching assistants' understanding of autistic college students and of the principles of Universal Design. This project is led and developed by a team of autistic and non-autistic researchers. You can access the training for free by clicking the button below.