Biographical note

Amy M. Wetherby, Ph.D., is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Communication Disorders at Florida State University. She received her doctorate from the University of California-San Francisco/Santa Barbara in 1982. She has had more than 20 years of clinical experience in the design and implementation of communication programs for children with autism and severe communication impairments and is an American Speech-Language-Hearing Association fellow. Dr. Wetherby's research has focused on communicative and social-cognitive aspects of language difficulties in children with autism and, more recently, on the early identification of children with communicative impairments. She has published extensively on these topics and presents regularly at national conventions. She is a co-author of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (with Barry M. Prizant [Applied Symbolix, 1993]). She is the Executive Director of the Florida State University Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and is Project Director of U.S. Department of Education Model Demonstration Grant No. H324M980173 on early identification of communication disorders in infants and toddlers and Personnel Preparation Training Grant No. H029A10066 specializing in autism.

Barry M. Prizant, Ph.D., has more than 25 years experience as a clinical scholar, researcher, and consultant to young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and related communication disabilities and their families. He is an American Speech-Language-Hearing Association fellow and is a member of the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disabilities. Formerly, he was Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Brown University Program in Medicine, Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Emerson College, and Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Intervention at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with ASD and their families in hospital and university clinic environments. He has been an invited presenter at two State of the Science Conferences on ASD at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has contributed to the NIH Clinical Practice Guidelines for early identification and diagnosis of ASD. Dr. Prizant's current research and clinical interests include identification and family-centered treatment of infants, toddlers, and young children who have or are at risk for sociocommunicative difficulties, including ASD.