Lauren Franz
Duke University, NC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Starting autism support early can greatly improve outcomes for children and families, but many children worldwide never receive it. The gap is especially wide in Africa, where autism specialists are scarce.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
- Topics
autism
early intervention
caregiver coaching
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate whether NDBI caregiver coaching delivered by non-specialist Early Childhood Development practitioners in South Africa improves caregiver-child interaction and child development, and whether it is cost-effective, in a hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial.
- Identify implementation determinants, the barriers and facilitators within South Africa's public-sector Education Department, to guide future scale-up of caregiver-mediated autism intervention.
- Examine moderators of intervention response and quantify autism-related behaviors with a digital assessment method, comparing these measures with existing U.S. data.
More about the research
One solution is to coach caregivers to deliver the intervention themselves, with the coaching done by non-specialist providers. Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs) are early autism approaches built into everyday play and routines that caregivers can deliver well.
Why it matters
Many autistic children in South Africa, and in U.S. communities short of trained providers, do not get timely evidence-based care. Showing what a minimal, non-specialist-delivered caregiver coaching package needs in order to work could help health and education systems expand affordable early autism support to families in workforce-limited settings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alice Carter
University of Massachusetts-Boston, MA·Psychology
Test in a randomized trial across 20 Early Intervention agencies whether training providers in Reciprocal Imitation Training (a play-based therapy) improves language and social communication in toddlers with early autism signs, compared with usual care.
Jaime Peterson
Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether Kinder Coaching, a parent coaching program delivered by community health workers, improves preschoolers' school readiness on the Brigance III screen compared with a provider-reviewed checklist, in a randomized trial of 240 Medicaid families in Oregon.
Lauren Haack
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Test whether students in schools using CLS-A-FUERTE, a school clinician training and ADHD/ODD intervention program, improve more in parent- and teacher-rated symptoms than students receiving usual services, in a cluster randomized trial across 40 Mexican schools.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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