Behavior: Profile
His child’s diagnosis changed the course of Craig Newschaffer's career and led him to redirect his epidemiological skills.
My son was diagnosed with autism when he was about 2½. Being in the business I’m in, I did a lot of learning on my own. I wrote some articles for the newsletter of a local autism society. I met with parents who were concerned about an autism cluster.All this got me wondering whether this was the direction I should take my epidemiological research. If I did this I couldn’t come at it from the perspective of someone crusading to help his own kid—the kind of work I do is on a completely different timetable. In the end, the bridge I had to cross was: I think about autism at home an awful lot—is it something I want to think about every day at work, too?
Then I came to Hopkins. This is a place where innovative thinking in public health is what it’s all about. Here there were a number of colleagues from other disciplines actively engaged in autism research. I decided there was an opportunity here I couldn’t pass up.
What I’m trying to do is bring epidemiologic research approaches to autism and other developmental disabilities. There’s been a real lack of that, which is one of the reasons why we’re behind other complex diseases like cancer, where there’s been a push for 15, 20 years now to look at how genes and environmental exposures work together.
I feel like I have more of a vision in my work now. The next decade is going to be huge for autism research. We’re not going to have every cause delineated and prevention strategies in place, but I think we’re going to move from this vacuum to a point where we’ve got some pretty good leads.
Jonas is 11. He’s a great kid. Living with him day in and day out is just amazing. It’s a round-hole world. He’s a square peg. All day. Every day. Once you get to know someone with autism, you can’t help but use a word like heroic to describe them.