Current Research

Effective puberty and sexual health education promotes body awareness and agency and normalizes conversations about consent, sexual and gender identities, and sexual behaviors. Unfortunately, autistic youth are frequently denied this key educational benefit. With this research, we hope to contribute to autistic individuals making safer and more informed decisions regarding sexual health. A validation of the educational tool that we use could help autistic individuals learn ways to have healthy romantic relationships, sexual behaviors, and reproductive awareness before new experiences and/or problems occur.

Pilot project funded by the Autism Intervention Research on Physical Health (AIR-P) Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Health Research Node. 

Adolescence is a complex developmental process with overlapping processes. Maturation is multifaceted identified by chronological age, growth, increasing hormone levels, brain growth, and puberty; each of which are correlated as well as uniquely explain variability of internalizing symptoms. An integrative investigation of the developmental process combining each maturation factors and parsing each of these factors' unique contribution is limited and a methodological challenge. Our project aims to disentangle developmental factors and to use an integrative, novel methodological approach in examining developmental metrics of pubertal timing and onset in neurotypical adolescents.

Follow project updates on ResearchGate by clicking on this link: New Pubertal Timing Metric: Gynecological Age and Peak Height Velocity.