Peter Mundy

Peter Mundy, Ph.D. is a developmental and clinical psychologist who has been working on defining the nature of autism for the past 30 years. His efforts in that regard began in 1981 at the UCLA where his work with collaborator Marian Sigman contributed to the understanding that joint attention impairments area fundamental feature of the social deficits of preschool children with autism. Between 1991 and 2007 he was the founding director of the University of Miami/Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (UM/NSU CARD) which serves over 4000 children and families. He is currently is the Lisa Capps Professor of Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Education at the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and School of Education. He is also the Director of Educational Research at the M.I.N.D. Institute. In the last ten years Dr. Mundy has been engaged in a program of research designed to advance the understanding and treatment of problems in learning, social and emotional development in school-aged children with autism. In 2006 he began a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) supported program of research devoted to understanding neuro-cognitive, motivational and social processes that affect individual differences in the expression and outcomes of autism in school-aged children. In 2009 he was awarded NIMH funding to enable his research group to develop a multidisciplinary virtual reality laboratory for research on the role of social-attention in the social-learning disabilities of school- aged children with autism (http://edscholars.ucdavis.edu/vrlab/home

). In 2012 Dr. Mundy and his research group were awarded an Institute for Education Sciences grant to provide a much needed large scale study of academic development in elementary and secondary students with autism (http://ies.ed.gov/funding/grantsearch/details.asp?ID=1256.). Dr. Mundy has published over 120 scientific papers on child development, autism and related disabilities. A May 2012 public radio broadcast discussion of Dr. Mundy's work can be found at http://www.capradio.org/articles/2012/04/30/virtual-reality-sheds-light-on-learning-with-autism