This is going to be a blog post about saying no. Recently I had the extreme good fortune to be selected for a training course in Strategic Research Leadership, being delivered by 64 Million Artists and wisely commissioned by my employer, University of Edinburgh. Of course, I didn’t think it was good fortune at the…
Righti-oh, here we go with Part Two of my blog responding to some of the themes from the 2019 meeting of the International Society for Autism Research. Part One was all about Inclusion at the conference – specifically about the inclusion of autistic people – and this one is going to be about Interdisciplinarity. In…
In the middle of 2018, a group of academics came together, with the realisation that we were all, separately, contributing to a new way of thinking about autism. In various ways we had – implicitly or explicitly – developed a quantiative and experimental test of the predictions of the Double Empathy Problem.
We collected our studies together and sent them in to the International Society for Autism Research, hoping for the opportunity to present our work in a symposium at the 2019 conference in Montreal. Unfortunately our symposium submission was not successful, but the authors of three of the submitted abstracts chose to present their work, individually (not within a symposium), at the conference. This is because INSAR offers abstracts submitted as part of an unsuccessful symposium the chance to be presented individually, as either a poster or a non-symposium spoken presentation.
The purpose of this Library post is to bring together those three abstracts, together with the over-arching symposium pitch, so that people attending #INSAR2019 can attempt to see all three and get a glimpse of the symposium experience we had in mind when we submitted. After the conference, we’ll be supplementing this initial post with more information from our Discussant, Damian Milton, and a podcast featuring the different authors and presenters in conversation.
tl:dr – if you’re at INSAR 2019 you need to see Catherine’s poster on Thursday morning, and at the same time, Kerrianne’s poster also on Thursday morning, and then Brett’s talk on Friday afternoon. But please read more below if you want to find out why we’ve created this post, and see the abstracts we submitted.
Last week we welcomed a final year high school student, interested in a career in psychology, to spend a week with our team. Here’s what he thought of the experience: I recently got the opportunity to get some work experience with Sue, and so for the past week I have been in Kennedy Tower working…
On Friday afternoon (in retrospect a foolish decision – never post anything controversial on twitter just before the weekend) I posted a series of tweets sharing this new project page. The project is a multi-site fully-powered clinical trial of a new manualised intervention for parents of autistic children. Let’s break that down a bit. Multi-site…
This is the latest in the blog series co-authored by myself and the extraordinary Duncan Astle. After a brief hiatus we are back with our latest post – how to put together a great poster. Designing an attractive and informative poster is an incredibly useful skill, especially for early-career researchers. For any non-academic readers –…
It’s been a wee while since I had a good autism-related rant on here, but my usual trip to the annual conference of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR – formerly this meeting was called IMFAR) provides an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, there was lots to love at this year’s INSAR. Work which…
Rather than attempt a single blog covering all aspects of grant-writing, Duncan Astle and I are continuing our blog series of advice to newly-fledged researchers by focusing on the challenges of costing a new grant. Costing a grant means working out exactly where money will be spent, and being realistic about what it is going…
This video comes from an event in 2017 where I spoke to Scottish PhD students, alongside my fabulous Autistic mentor, Kabie. We were talking about why and how researchers can collaborate with the autistic community in the work they do. I hope you will find it handy. You can now also see Kabie’s talk,…
The exceptional Duncan Astle and I continue our intermittent blog series on academic life today, this time focusing on the stressful post-PhD employment scene. There are a number of options for those who want to stay in academia post-PhD, all highly competitive and with unique stressors. Today, we’re talking about one of the most common…