Autism expert offers insight into language

Diane Williams

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Bowling Green State University will welcome back one of its graduates for a special program about autism. Dr. Diane Williams, who received her Ph.D. in speech-language pathology in 1999, will present “Learning and Using Language with Autism: Insights from Neuroscience” from 9 a.m. to noon on Friday (April 16) in the Sebo Athletic Center.

Williams, who is an assistant professor in the department of speech-language pathology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, is co-director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh. The center is funded by the National Institutes of Health to study the neurobiological basis of autism. She conducts behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of social cognition and language processing in autism with colleagues at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University.

Williams is an American Speech-Language Hearing Association Board-Recognized specialist in child language and certified speech-language pathologist with extensive clinical experience working with toddlers, preschoolers, school-age children and adults with a wide variety of developmental language disorders. She is the author of “Developmental Language Disorders: Learning, Language and the Brain.”


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(Posted April 14, 2010 )