2025 Autism Acceptance Month: USC faculty experts list

April is Autism Acceptance Month. The CDC estimates that one out of every 36 8-year-olds and one in 45 adults is affected by autism, a lifelong developmental disorder. As South Carolina’s leader in health sciences, USC has researchers across disciplines who specialize in autism.

The university has compiled a list of faculty experts to help reporters develop stories about autism spectrum disorder. To interview a faculty member, contact the staff member listed with each expert.

Autism and families

Robert Hock, a professor in the College of Social Work, specializes in the impact of autism spectrum disorder on family life. “My work helps families of autistic children get the support they need to be healthy and successful,” Hock says. “In partnership with communities, I create family interventions that build parenting skills and confidence, strengthen family relationships, and provide access to the right knowledge and services for young children with autism spectrum disorder.” Hock has developed the Autism Parent Navigators, a program that pairs families who have experienced autism with families who have newly received a diagnosis.
News contact: Victoria Montgomery, vmontgom@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-946

Autism and fragile X

Jane Roberts, professor of psychology, is among a handful of researchers in the world who study autism-fragile X relationships. Fragile X is a single-gene disorder that is the No. 1 known biological cause of autism. Among males, nearly 75 percent of fragile X cases also are diagnosed with autism. She runs the Neurodevelopmental Disorders Lab, and her research focuses on early detection methods among high-risk populations. Roberts can discuss the link between autism and fragile X and her research to understand both.
News contact: Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu, 803-576-7650

Autism intervention

Sarah Edmunds is an assistant professor of psychology. She directs the Community-Oriented Lab for Autism and Behavioral Interventions (COLAB). Her research focuses on interventions for social communication and how we can identify the most effective interventions for each autistic child or teen. She studies emotion regulation and externalizing behavior in autistic toddlers, along with ways of training or supporting community systems to incorporate evidence-based early interventions into their practice with families.
News contact: Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu, 803-576-7650

Dan Foster is an assistant professor at the School of Medicine Columbia’s Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Neuroscience. His research focuses on discovering new drugs to help treat repetitive behaviors seen in individuals on the autism spectrum. Foster’s work studies the brain circuits involved in these behaviors to identify specific targets in the brain through which drugs can modulate these circuits and help suppress repetitive behaviors.
News contact: Emily Miles, emily.miles@uscmed.sc.edu, 803-216-3302

Ashley King Holt teaches specialized graduate level courses in the areas of severe and multiple disabilities, applied behavior analysis, and early childhood special education. She supervises MAT and M.Ed. teacher candidates as well as provides group and individual supervision for students seeking to become Board Certified Behavior Analysts. She also teaches the introductory special education course to both graduate and undergraduates. Before transitioning to teach in higher education, she taught young children with autism and multiple disabilities in a local public-school district for eight years. In addition to her work in the school district, she provided applied behavior analysis services in the home and community to support families and children with disabilities.
News contact: Anna Westbury, annafrancis@sc.edu, 803-576-6851

Lauren LeJeune is an assistant professor of special education in the Department of Educational and Development Science. Her background includes experience as a special education teacher of students with mild to moderate disabilities and work as a research assistant on federally funded projects designed to investigate effective academic and behavioral supports for students with disabilities.
News contact: Anna Westbury, annafrancis@sc.edu, 803-576-6851

Liz Will is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the Arnold School of Public Health. She investigates early atypical development and co-occurring autism in genetic conditions associated with intellectual disability, specifically Down syndrome. She is particularly interested in attention and motor phenotypes and aims to understand how they interact across development to shape outcomes related to cognition, communication and co-occurring conditions, including autism and ADHD.
News contact: Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu, 843-302-1681

Katie Wolfe is an associate professor of special education and applied behavior analysis in the College of Education. She researches how teachers monitor progress and make instructional decisions to maximize outcomes for students with autism and related disabilities. She can discuss applied behavior analysis (ABA) and evidence-based practices for students with autism, especially those designed to address challenging behaviors and teach language and communication skills.
News contact: Anna Westbury, annafrancis@sc.edu, 803-576-6851

Autism and the language of music

Scott Price is the Carolina Distinguished Professor of piano and piano pedagogy in the School of Music. He is the founder of the Carolina LifeSong Initiative, which provides creative music experiences and piano lessons for students with special needs and is dedicated in fostering best practices in teaching music to students with special needs. His book “Autism and Piano Study: A Basic Teaching Vocabulary” was published in 2023. Price’s work with special needs musicians has been featured by organizations in the United States and internationally.
News contact: Marlena Crovatt-Bagwell, crovattb@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-7962

Diagnosing autism

Jessica Bradshaw is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Early Social Development Lab. Her research focuses on methods for early detection of autism in infancy. She studies early development of autonomic regulation, attention, motor skills and social interaction that predict the emergence of autism and its features.
News contact: Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu, 803-576-7650

Caitlin Hudac is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Brain Research Across Development (B-RAD) Lab. Her work uses cognitive neuroscience technologies, including eye tracking, EEG and functional MRI, to understand how the brain and body change from birth into adulthood. Hudac is identifying biomarkers such as brain and heart rate signatures that could be critical for generating targeted treatments for those with autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability and rare genetic conditions.
News contact: Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu, 803-576-7650

Christian O’Reilly, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, specializes in how different areas of the brain communicate. His research in computational neuroscience, biosignal processing and neuroimaging aims to identify the organizing principles of the brain, notably for the development of biomarkers for the early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. He also researches novel ways to study autism and the brain through modeling and artificial intelligence. He is a member of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, the Institute for Mind and Brain and the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research Center.
News contact: Chris Woodley, cwoodley@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-576-7745