After 44 years, an autism pioneer steps down

Yale School of Medicine

Fred Volkmar. View full image

Fred Volkmar has retired.

Sort of.

A beloved mentor who remains connected to former students and colleagues, a popular teacher, and an international authority on Asperger’s syndrome and autism, Volkmar served as the chief of child psychiatry at Yale New Haven Hospital; Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology (now emeritus) at the Yale Child Study Center; and director of the Child Study Center. He has authored several hundred scientific papers and numerous books and book chapters, and he has advised a long list of professional, education, and government entities.
 
Although colleagues gathered in October to celebrate his retirement from Yale, Volkmar is hardly sitting back. In 1984, he offered the country’s first undergraduate course on autism, Autism and Related Disorders—a course so popular that he continues to teach it in the summer. He has three books in progress, he teaches master’s students in special education at Southern Connecticut State University, and he is involved with programs that train police and other first responders on interacting with individuals with autism—and that teach those individuals how to navigate traffic stops. (“Adults who want to be independent have to be able to drive,” he notes.)
 
Volkmar’s interest in autism began during his undergraduate days at the University of Illinois when he volunteered at a state training school for children with developmental disabilities—one of many such institutions that were in place before the 1975 federal law requiring public schools to provide equal education access for children with physical and/or mental disabilities. After obtaining both a master’s in psychology and his MD at Stanford, he came to Yale in 1980 as a fellow at the Child Study Center and stayed here for the rest of his career.

“I knew I wanted to study autism,” Volkmar says, “but only three major places in the country had autism research programs. Most people then didn’t even know what the word ‘autism’ meant.” He was impressed by the Child Study Center’s combination of research with clinical practice, and he built on that approach by launching the Developmental Disabilities Clinic. Since 1982, the clinic has both trained generations of clinical investigators and provided direct services to thousands of children and their families.

Throughout, Volkmar’s career has been marked by a commitment to translating research findings into accessible information for educators and parents. “Even with his incredible achievements in writing and research, Fred has always been a dedicated clinician who prioritized care for his patients and their families above all else,” says James McPartland, the current Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology and director of the Developmental Disabilities Clinic.

Volkmar notes that greater understanding of the neurobiological basis of the condition, along with early detection and intervention, have dramatically improved outcomes for the majority of individuals with autism. “We now have the happy problem of helping adolescents with autism and their parents plan for college,” he says, “something we could scarcely have imagined a few decades ago.”