Honored by ASHA

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 Dr. Barry M. Prizant Dr. Barry M. Prizant

Dr. Barry M. Prizant was recognized by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) at their annual convention in November with an Honors of the Association award. The Honors award is the highest recognition given by ASHA (membership – 150,000 professionals), in recognition of an individual whose “contributions have been of such excellence that they have enhanced or altered the course of the professions.”  Specifically, this honor is in recognition of Prizant’s provision of “exemplary professional services, research and other contributions to persons with significant communication challenges and their families in the past 40 years.”

Prizant is a member of Temple Emanu-El, and serves on their Board of Trustees. He also serves on the Inclusion Committee, and participates in the monthly Koleinu Service for families who have children with special needs.

In his career, Prizant has served in many roles as a clinical scholar, researcher and consultant to persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and related disabilities, and those with emotional/behavioral challenges and their families. He is a speech-language pathologist who has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with social-communication disabilities and autism in hospital and university clinic settings. He consults to schools and agencies internationally, from early intervention through adult services. Prizant was a tenured professor in the master’s and doctoral programs at Emerson College and Southern Illinois University, and served on the faculty of the Brown University Medical School.

Since 1998, Prizant has served as the director of Childhood Communication Services, a private practice, and as an adjunct professor at Brown University, currently affiliated with the Artists and Scientists as Partners group in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. He currently writes a regular column for Autism Spectrum Quarterly Magazine.  Prizant is co-author of The SCERTS Model, an educational/treatment model for individuals with autism and related special needs adopted in more than a dozen countries. In the past 20 years, he co-founded and co-facilitates an annual parent weekend retreat attended by parents of children with autism.  The retreat is conducted in collaboration with Community Autism Resources, a Massachusetts-based parent run family support center, and his wife, Dr. Elaine Meyer, a psychologist, nurse and director of the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice at the Harvard Medical School. Prizant’s contributions have been recognized previously by a Princeton University-Eden Foundation Career Award in autism and the “Divine Neurotypical Award” of GRASP, the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership.

Prizant’s forthcoming book “Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism” (with Tom Fields-Meyer) will be published in August 2015 by Simon & Schuster.