Leaders in the Field

• Identify five (5) of the "thought leaders" in your area of research.  Who are the experts? To whom do the experts turn for guidance? Whose opinion or understanding carries substantial weight?

1.) Tim Shriver- He is the Chairman and CEO of Special Olympics, He is a high school teacher in Connecticut and a counselor for the University of Connecticut for disadvantaged youth. I envision their work being useful to me because he is a counselor and a teacher and both of those aspects will help be decide where child work better with special disabilities.

2.) Temple Grandin- She is an animal doctor and a proffessor at Colorado State University and also a cunsultant on livestock behavior. She is also a high functioning person with autisum an invented the hug machene it is desgned to calm hypersensitive people. I envision her work being helpful because she has irst hand expirence with autism and I can get a sense of how is it to have it.

3.) Dr. Margie B. Gillis- She is a sociology and elementary education undergrad at Connecticut College, also she received an Ed.D. in Special Education from the University of Louisville. She is a teacher and helps struggeling students in elementary school and middle school. She will help with my project because she is actually teaching the students and she will know what is the best work enviornment to be.

4.) Dr. Geraldine Dawson- She earned a Ph.D. in developmental and child clinical psychology from University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. She was Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina and became Chief Science Officer at Autism Speaks and Research Professor of Psychiatry at UNC. She was Founding Director of the UW Autism Center, a multidisciplinary autism research and clinical program. Her scientific achievements include discovering that autism symptoms can be recognized during infancy, pioneering the use of event-related potentials to study brain dysfunction in autism. She will help out with my research by me looking up about autism and learning all about it to help communicate with students better.

5.)  Paula Kluth, Ph.D.- She is a consult, teacher, author, advocate and scholar. Paula is a former special education teacher who has served as a classroom eacher, consulting teacher, and inclusion facilitor. She is the author of many books that help with teaching autistic children and making them the ebst they can be. I think she will help be because she was a teacher and she will help in that aspect, and her books will help me to read.