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Elizabeth Torres on Autistic Neuromotor Differences: The TPGA Interview

Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: two white kids in bathing suits running on a beach towards some waves.] Elizabeth Torres is Director and Principal Investigator at the New Jersey Autism Center of Excellence, and a researcher at Rutgers University, where her lab “develops new methods for precision medicine and mobile health.” We spoke with Dr. Torres about her work on autism’s motor and movement underpinnings, and why research in this area could lead to autistic people getting greatly improved and highly person-specific accommodations and supports, and why autism research is so rarely truly evidence-based. Why is understanding neuromotor-based factors in autism so important? Elizabeth Torres: As you know, autism is currently defined by observation. Think about a continuum from zero to ten, where at zero you have opinion, and at ten you have hardcore rigorous science, mathematically based. And somewhere in between, you have pseudoscience and soft science…