• Question: What initially got you interested specifically in the minds of autistic people?

    Asked by anon-374650 to Berengere, Emma S on 15 Nov 2023. This question was also asked by anon-374646.
    • Photo: Berengere Digard

      Berengere Digard answered on 15 Nov 2023:


      My journey towards autism is a bit unusual! I come from France, where people don’t really talk about autism. I knew very little about autism up until the end of my Masters. Then one day, as I was working through ideas for my future PhD research, I watched a 10min-long interview with an autistic bilingual author talking about his new book on autism. I was hooked! The next day I bought the book and read it in one day (even though I’m a very slow reader). And that was it! I loved learning about the autistic mind and the autistic way of perceiving the world. I was shocked to learn about the unfounded stigma and the lack of fair opportunities. All the emotions! I wanted to learn more and do more, so I completely abandoned the original idea I had for a PhD project in England (something about dementia), and instead found an autism research to work with in Scotland

      It just goes to show: sometimes watching the telly for 10min can entirely change the course of your life!

    • Photo: Emma Sullivan

      Emma Sullivan answered on 11 Dec 2023:


      I applied for a project examining sleep in autistic adults. I found that most work on sleep examines it in autistic children and there was little work out there for adults. We wanted to design an intervention to help as their sleep tends to be quite disrupted and poor.

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