Article in "Inside Higher Ed" in Frist Center for Autism and Innovation
‘Highest Levels of Research’
Hari Srinivasan, an advocate for autistic people, neuroscience Ph.D. student and NISE program fellow, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the revocation of the NSF funding could have ripple effects on the overall perception of autistic people, as well as on research into their experiences.
“When you cut off the funds, autism gets less visibility, which means opportunities are less, which will slow the work we’ve done towards progress and solutions,” wrote Srinivasan. “[It] also means less research in autism space. And ultimately research findings is what influences funding priorities, who get access to what spaces, who gets access to what resources, and it is research findings that lead us to solutions.”
Srinivasan, who describes himself as having limited spoken language ability, said he’d been interested in neuroscience since he was a middle schooler and became fascinated by illustrations of the nervous system in textbooks owned by his aunt and uncle, who are doctors. But his experiences with special education classes in elementary and middle school—which he described as being “like kindergarten on repeat year after year”—left him unsure if he would be able to pursue his dreams of becoming a neuroscientist.
Luckily, his experiences at a charter high school that allowed him to take more advanced courses and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his undergraduate degree, continued to set him up for success: Stassun personally recruited him to Vanderbilt. Now he is researching how autistic people “perceive and interact with the space immediately around their bodies, known as peripersonal space,” he told Inside Higher Ed. He hopes to transform his research into practical solutions “that can help autistics better navigate their spatial and social environment.”
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