Our Projects

Through a contract with Georgia's statewide Early Intervention system, Babies Can't Wait, our team partners with and trains providers in evidence-based practices for young children with social-communication delays. Early Intervention providers can receive training in Project ImPACT, an evidence-based parent-coaching model that equips caregivers with tools to support their child's communication development. As part of our work with Georgia's Early Intervention system, we study how Project ImPACT can be delivered flexibly to meet the needs of Early Intervention systems and families. We are also working closely with the Georgia Department of Public Health to develop teams that make it easier for families to connect with Project ImPACT, family navigation, and the care they need within their own public health district.

Status: Ongoing

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Karen Guerra, Natalie Brane, Kadie Ulven Hopkins, Liz Greenfield, Marycruz Valdivia Acosta, Sarah Myers, Michelle Pu, and Jocelyn Kuhn

We are leading a strategic initiative to expand access to best practices for autism – from screening to diagnosis to longitudinal care – within primary care settings across Georgia. Our goal is to bridge the care gap among autism specialists, community primary care clinicians, and children on the autism spectrum and their families. Through this program, Georgia-based pediatric primary care providers are learning to evaluate, differentiate, and diagnose children with unambiguous characteristics of autism between the ages of 14 and 48 months. They are receiving specific de-identified case guidance in a convenient, interactive, web-based small-group format. The ECHO hub team experts are: Dr. Jennifer Zubler, Dr. Carley Niehaus, Dr. Jocelyn Kuhn, Dr. Allison Schwartz, Natasha Nelson, Moira Pileggi, and Chris Booth. 

Team Members: Jocelyn Kuhn, Alexa Gonzalez Laca, Jun Kim, and Lyric Ransom

Autistic students are much more likely to have anxiety than non-autistic peers. Although schools are an ideal place to increase access to mental health services, we don't know which programs are most effective to support anxious autistic students. We are currently helping to compare two school-based anxiety programs being delivered by Interdisciplinary School Providers to autistic students with anxiety, ages 8-15 years. This project is being conducted in partnership with the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It includes two advisory boards consisting of autistic teens, caregivers, school providers, and researchers. This research project is funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Status: Recruiting

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Nina Menon, Michelled Pu, Sarah Myers, and Alex Kolios

Through the collaborative partnership with the Georgia Department of Education, our team provides accessible training on evidence-based, targeted Tier-2 interventions that promote mental and behavioral health among K-12 students with anxiety, autism, and/or ADHD. We provide training on programs such as Unstuck, On Target, and Facing Your Fears. Our selection of interventions was informed by an initial needs assessment survey of 453 K-12 educators and student support staff across the state.

Team Members: Jocelyn Kuhn, Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Lyric Ransom, Jules Zielke, and Nina Menon

With funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), our team will develop strategies to make it easier for Spanish-speaking Latine caregivers, autistic people, therapists, and other community members to partner, engage, and lead research. We hope to develop tools to promote the delivery of family-centered, culturally relevant services that are more easily accessible to Latine autistic individuals and their families. As part of our project, we will organize four ongoing workgroups, community roundtables, and town halls to gather input from partners and share what we develop.

Team Members: Karen Guerra, Katherine Pickard, Bren Muñoz, Anamiguel Pomales Ramos, Megan Gross, Alexa Gonzalez Laca, Marycruz Valdivia Acosta, and Nancy Garcia

This project is led by the Waisman Center (UW–Madison) in partnership with the Marcus Autism Center (Emory University). It is an HRSA-funded initiative to strengthen how evidence-based autism practices are delivered across the lifespan. The project brings together people with lived experience, providers, and researchers to co-design strategies that make it easier to access high-quality care — from early childhood through the transition to adult services. Through implementation research, workforce development, and national collaboration, the Consortium aims to improve coordination and outcomes across autism systems of care nationwide.

Status: Ongoing

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Jocelyn Kuhn, and Nina Menon

This project began three years ago in partnership with LaAmistad, Inc., a nonprofit that provides educational and life-enrichment services to Latino children and their families in Georgia. Our work with LaAmistad has been grounded in community-based participatory methods with an emphasis on community capacity building. Following a year-long needs assessment, we received funding from the Liz Blake Giving Fund to develop and pilot a caregiver-mediated early language and literacy program designed to support Latino caregivers in learning and using strategies that promote their child’s communication skills. Since starting in Fall 2023, this program has served 75 families.

Status: Ongoing

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Karen Guerra, Alexa Gonzalez Laca, and Marycruz Valdivia Acosta

We adapted an evidence-based program to support the transition to adulthood for autistic youth and their parents, available in English and Spanish: Transitioning Together/Juntos en la Transición (TT/JET). The adaptation aimed to improve the program's feasibility, accessibility, and fit in low-resource service settings. Families who participated in our prior small pilot test of this adapted version of TT/JET reported high satisfaction with the program and strong social validity. In our current clinical trial, funded by the Deborah Munroe Noonan Memorial Research Fund, we are testing the effectiveness of this adapted version of TT/JET at Boston Medical Center (BMC), New England's largest safety-net hospital system.

Team Members: Jocelyn Kuhn, Nina Menon, Michelle Pu, Jun Kim, Emily Hickey, Jay Wilson, Rola Adebogun, Emily Barnard, and Marycruz Valdivia Acosta

Over half of all autistic children receive Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) at some point during their childhood. While ABA services have rapidly expanded over the past decade, community ABA services have been criticized for their intensity, varied quality, and tendency to use highly structured teaching approaches. Our team has been conducting research to understand the barriers to delivering high-quality and developmentally appropriate services within ABA settings. We are currently focused on identifying the benefits and harms of specific therapeutic strategies used in ABA settings from the perspectives of autistic adults, caregivers, and ABA clinicians, and have a second project focused on the barriers to delivering parent coaching within community ABA settings.

Status:

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Rachel Yosick, Jun Kim, Tracy Argueta, Jules Zielke, Michelle Pu, and Sydney Olson

In this study, we are working to harness methods from implementation science to identify, develop, and apply strategies to maximize the positive impact of EarliPoint, an objective, time-efficient, accurate, biomarker-based autism diagnostic tool for families and across the system of autism care within an urban safety-net hospital’s integrated primary care clinic.

Team Members: Jocelyn Kuhn, Alexa Gonzalez Laca, Lyric Ransom, Jun Kim, Nina Menon, Brooke Demetri, and Katherine Pickard