Our Projects

Through a contract with the Georgia Department of Public Health's 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. Providers receive training in Project ImPACT, an evidence-based parent-coaching model that gives caregivers tools to support their child's communication development. As part of our research, we are interested in understanding how easy it is for providers to learn and use programs like Project ImPACT and how these programs 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 strategies that make it easier for more Early Intervention providers to learn and use programs like Project ImPACT.

Status: Ongoing

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Karen Guerra, Nicole Hendrix, Natalie Brane, Kadie Ulven Hopkins, Liz Greenfield, Jocelyn Kuhn, Marycruz Valdivia Acosta

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 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It includes two advisory boards consisting of autistic teens, caregivers, school providers, and researchers. This research project is funding by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Status: Recruiting

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Selena Valladares Ortiz, Nina Menon, Michelle Pu

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 and On Target and Facing Your Fears. Our intervention selection was informed by an initial needs assessment survey with 453, K-12 educators and student support staff across the state.

Team Members: Nailah Islam, Lyric Ransom, Isabel Alford, Katherine Pickard, Jocelyn Kuhn, Megan Kemp, Jules Zielke

With funding from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), our team will develop strategies that 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 that promote the delivery of family-centered and culturally relevant services that are more easily accessed by Latine autistic individuals and their families. As part of our project, we will be partnering with the University of Massachusetts Bilingual Language Development Lab to organize four ongoing workgroups, community roundtables, and townhalls to get input from partners and to share what we develop.

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

This project began three years ago in partnership with LaAmistad, Inc., a non-profit that works to provide 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, Marycruz Valdivia Acosta

We recently 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 now testing the effectiveness of this adapted version of TT/JET within Boston Medical Center (BMC), New England's largest safety net hospital system.

Team Members: Jocelyn Kuhn, Nina Menon, Rola Adebogun, Marycruz Valdiva Acosta, Alexa Gonzalez Laca

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: Closed

Team Members: Katherine Pickard, Nailah Islam, Naomi Green, Trinity Jackson, Rachel Yosick, Jun Kim, Tracy Argueta, Jules Zielke

We are leading a strategic initiative to expand access to autism best practices – from screening to diagnosis to longitudinal care – within primary care settings across the state of Georgia. Our goal is to bridge the care gap between autism specialists, community health 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 14-48 months. They are receiving specific de-identified case guidance in a convenient, interactive web-based small-group format. The ECHO hub team experts include: Dr. Jennifer Zubler, Dr. John Constantino, Dr. Jocelyn Kuhn, Dr. Allison Schwartz, Natasha Nelson, and Chris Booth.

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

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, highly accurate biomarker-based autism diagnostic tool for families and across the system autism care within an urban safety net hospital’s integrated primary care clinic.  We will assess key implementation and service outcomes as we introduce implementation strategies designed to address EarliPoint implementation challenges.

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