In particular, what we know about early intervention is that it often has the largest benefits
of most impact on children from vulnerable backgrounds.
That's where we actually see the largest gains and differences.
The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe, and we are in the middle
of a scientific revolution to understand its inner workings.
Join us for a conversation with world-renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester.
I am Dr. John Foxe, Director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University
of Rochester, and you are listening to Neuroscience Perspectives.
I have a fantastic guest here today, Professor Brian Boyd from the University of North Carolina.
Brian is a researcher in the domain of developmental disabilities, very specifically focused on
autism with a background in special education.
We're going to dive into that with Brian momentarily.
He's been dedicated to bringing solutions to the classroom and early intervention in
autism and in recent times has very specifically turned to dealing with this in underrepresented
and marginalized communities in the black community.
Brian is, and he has a long title, he is the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor
of Education and he's the Interim Director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development
Institute at the University of North Carolina.
Brian it's really fantastic to have you here in Rochester.
We want to dive in, get to know you a little bit.
Actually before we get into the science and we get into developmental disabilities, tell
us a little bit about growing up, how did you end up, where did you go to school and
all the rest of it, what were the motivations in life?
Sure, thank you.
Well first of all John, it's wonderful to be here, so thank you for having me.
So I grew up in a very small town in Virginia, population of less than a thousand, so it's
rural Virginia.
For those who know Virginia, it's really split between southern Virginia and northern Virginia
and the northerners don't really claim the state the same way because they consider themselves
sort of part of Maryland and DC in that sort of area.
But I grew up, my grandparents had operated a farm really, so I grew up in a farm, a small
farm town really.
In that small town, I had, it was real sense of community and that sense of community really
sort of inspired me to think about sort of my own education and the opportunities that
I wanted to avail myself of.
It was a very supportive community in many ways because it was such a small town and
all of us knew each other.
I was a first generation college student when I went off to college.
I went to, did my undergraduate at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Jefferson's University?
Yes, yes it is, Jefferson's University.
The oldest university, like they say in the US.
And there I sort of started down this pathway of autism at the College of William & Mary.
From there, after I graduated, I worked for a little bit at the Teach Autism program in
the state of North Carolina.
So that gave me certainly much more of an introduction to autism and autism research.
And then sort of because of some people I met there, I was inspired to continue my studies
and go on to graduate school.
Then did a master's of education at the University of Virginia and ultimately my PhD in special
education at the University of Florida.
So that's sort of my pathway, if you will.
And then I ended up back in Chapel Hill for a postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill.
Right, right.
And you know, I mean, you came from a farming community, a small town, not an academic background,
is that true to say?
And I mean, when you were making this jump to really the highest levels of education,
was that new for your family and your community?
Was that a thing for you?
It was certainly new for my family, yes.
Like I said, neither of my parents went to college.
So I was a first generation college student.
So that experience was new for my immediate family.
I had extended family members that had gone to university and gone to college, but not
in my immediate family.
So navigating that was a journey.
But I think part of what I really had were just two supportive parents who were there
and willing to help me navigate this sort of novel situation that they had no experience
with, but they were there to listen.
And when I had issues or problems arise.
So I think just knowing that they were supportive of what I was trying to do really meant a
lot and sort of inspired me to continue.
Right, right.
And then how early would you have had this sort of thought, I want to be in education
and specifically, you know, kids who are not neurotypical, who are struggling?
Yeah.
I'm not sure when I was in high school, again, this was a very small town, that I interacted
with a lot of students with disabilities.
At the time I was in school, school was pretty segregated.
The students with disabilities that did exist, existed in totally separate classrooms.
I don't remember any students being included.
No mainstreaming.
Yeah.
At least in my school.
This was a small school with not a ton of students.
And almost all of them, I do believe, rode sort of separate buses.
So there was almost separation between us who were neurotypical and students with disabilities.
So it really wasn't until I got to college, and I was actually doing some undergraduate
research with a social psychology professor, but this was in the days before computers
were plentiful and we used to print out data and check things line by line.
I was like, oh my gosh.
This is the most tedious job ever.
I don't want to spend my entire summer doing this.
And I had taken what was then called abnormal psychology and abnormal psychology course.
And in the textbook, there was really literally no more than a paragraph about autism.
And this was the late 90s.
But something about that paragraph sort of stuck out to me.
And I really can't explain what it was.
But I ended up searching online, however, we searched before Google.
And what popped up, likely because of proximity of the state of North Carolina to the state
of Virginia, was a camp called Camp Royal that's located in Pittsburgh, North Carolina.
And I decided to apply there to become a camp counselor.
And most of us who were camp counselors were undergraduate college students.
For many of us, it was our first exposure that we knew of to autism.
But it was 10 weeks of working with autistic individuals of varying ages, varying support
needs, varying ability levels.
And it was that experience that really led me to continue in the field.
Right.
Was there something specific about interacting with kids with autism?
Talk to me about that human to human interaction.
Is there something there that really just gets you going?
Is that the thing?
Yeah.
I think it was.
I mean, what led me into, I mean, there really is, what led me into special education specifically
was after I finished up at the camp, at that camp, at Camp Royal, what used to happen was
almost on a weekly basis, clinical psychology interns who worked at the Teach program will
come out and support us sort of novice camp counselors.
And I was talking to one of them and said, I think I want to continue in autism.
I'll be graduating soon.
Do you have any recommendations?
And the person said, I suggest you contact Gary Mezoboff, who at the time was the director
of the Teach autism program.
I had no idea who Gary Mezoboff was, but I cold called him.
And for some reason, Gary Mezoboff called me back.
And to make it a shorter story, he offered me a job at the Teach autism program.
One of the things I got to do was work in a classroom for preschool aged children.
And at the time, we also started a program for newly diagnosed two year olds.
And again, this is the late nineties when we weren't diagnosing as many two year olds
with autism.
And in that program, I had this wonderful experiences, interactions with young children,
and their parents, and hearing their stories, right?
And just seeing the growth, like what transpired in such a short amount of time, the transformations
I saw in those kids, just by, this was really three or four hours of exposure to a classroom
a day.
But it was really wonderful experiences.
And actually one of the kids who was in that two year old program recently had some contact
with his dad, and he's now a college student, and he's majoring in jazz.
He's becoming a jazz musician.
So just those kinds of stories and interactions are just sort of really sustain you in many
ways.
I do think you see parents interacting with kids, parents love their kids, but neurotypical
folks, they're going about their day.
But when you see parents interacting with a child with a developmental disability, you
see love in the moment right there.
There's something very inspiring about that, I think, for people who work in our field.
I was constantly reminding you while you're here.
Now that brings me to something, you've chosen really to be at the inter bench, the pointy
end of the system, right?
I need to deliver solutions for people.
Tell us about that.
And what's effective?
Where do you see the grist in the middle here?
Yeah.
And actually that, to some degree, started my...that inspiration also started during
that time in the Teach Autism program because we were in the classroom.
And there was a period of time where we didn't have a full time teacher.
And at that time I did not have a teaching license.
I hadn't received my masters of education yet.
So they brought in someone who was a former teacher but currently completing her doctoral
studies in special education at UNC Chapel Hill.
And this person worked in the classroom.
And part of what I saw her do with kids and how she applied what she was learning within
her PhD program to the work she was doing with children sort of inspired me to continue
and to move into the education realm.
And so really that intervention research, I just had so many questions as a result of
that experience.
Why did some kids improve so much?
How do we help most kids gain the maximal benefit?
And I was exposed to different intervention programs.
I did teach for a while.
I did applied behavior analysis.
I got exposed to floor time.
A number of us in the field know there was a recent paper by Amy Weatherby and others
showing that early intervention does have a difference.
There is something related to timing of exposure to intervention that can make a difference
for outcomes.
But I think we know that more broadly to some degree in the field that early intervention
matters.
When you introduced me, you talked about that I'm interim director at the Frank Portogram
Child Development Institute.
And that institute is really famous for a landmark study that was done in the US called
the Apisodarian study.
And that study was started in the 1970s where it was a randomized control trial where children
living in poverty were randomized to receive high quality classroom based intervention
or usual services.
Those folks have been followed now into adulthood and they continue to have better outcomes,
health outcomes, employment outcomes, less contact with the criminal justice system all
because it seems of exposure to high quality early intervention and early development.
So we know that early intervention can have long term positive outcomes, profound positive
outcomes.
And in particular what we know about early intervention is that it often has the largest
benefits of most impact on children from vulnerable backgrounds.
That's where we actually see the largest gains and differences.
So obviously students with disabilities, autistic students are a vulnerable group.
And we can think about them in that space of how we sort of maximize their development
early in life to achieve the best gains later in life.
But the second part of your question is I think we're still unpacking autism.
It is heterogeneous and we certainly deal with that on an intervention side of things
as well.
How do we think about sort of what baseline characteristics of children sort of moderate
intervention, their response to intervention?
And I think we're still sorting that out to some degree.
I think we certainly know that children who have co-occurring intellectual disability
often have a different response than students who don't have a co-occurring intellectual
disability.
And where I've been going in my research is then what does it mean for students who are
from racially minoritized backgrounds?
What is their intervention response?
And should we be thinking more about culturally tailoring of our interventions as a result?
And so I do think we're trying to move to this place of how do we best stratify and
maybe we need a combination of not just behavioral factors but biological factors that may better
help us figure out who will respond to which intervention.
I think we're still moving in that direction to some degree.
We're in a strange time in American political history.
We're in a time where there's a movement to say we shouldn't be classifying anybody according
to race.
Those days are over.
Does this worry you?
Obviously, from a science perspective, you can add high vulnerability to racially marginalized
underrepresented groups.
Are you worried about this?
I don't want to get you deep into the politics.
I know you're a scientist.
How does that play into your thinking these days?
I mean, yes, it's worrisome to some degree.
As we all know, race is a social construct.
There's really no biological basis for race itself.
But I wish that we were all starting at a place of equality, that all racial groups
were treated the same.
We know that is not the case.
But we also know that the driver of disparity is not race but underlying racism and that
how racial groups are treated differently as a result of physical characteristics, in
this case, the color of their skin.
If we can get to a place of equality in this country, then I think we can have some different
discussions about race.
But until we solve the underlying issues of racism that are driving the disparities we're
seeing in various communities across various outcomes, then I think we still have some
work to do.
And as we all know, this issue of equity that people are talking about, while it may seem
like a scary word or buzzword, as we ultimately know, it's really just a concept of fairness,
providing people what they need, of really tailoring things to people.
Because not everyone needs the same.
It shouldn't be controversial because we know that not everyone needs the same thing.
And so now we're just talking about that within the context of really social classes and societal
hierarchies.
Some groups are treated differently because of different reasons.
And so how do we provide those groups what they need?
So I hope we can have some more balanced conversations because I think these conversations benefit
all children and all of us as a society if we can think about issues of fairness.
Sorry to drag you into political space, but I really appreciate your answer there.
And I appreciate the work that you're doing with youngsters.
You're really in the trenches, you're up to your elbows in trying to bring solutions,
bring a better life, allow kids to live the best possible life.
And I just think, what could be better than that?
I think all of us in the neurosciences are proud of you and proud of what you do.
Let me ask you one last question.
I always ask this question.
You've had an amazing life, really.
You've reached the absolute pinnacle of the academy from a small town in Virginia.
When you talk to your graduate students or youngsters in the schools, they say, how do
I do it?
How do I do what Brian Boyd did?
Do you have some pearls of wisdom for them?
Is there advice for them?
I guess two pieces of advice.
For me, and I think for other people in the field that I've interacted with as well, mentors
are really important.
Find your supportive mentoring network, and sometimes you need mentors for different reasons.
Sometimes it's not just about the science.
Sometimes it's just about navigating academia.
When I was in my doctoral program, one of my mentors was a Latina woman.
And I talked to her about what it's like being a minority in the academy.
And those are the conversations we had.
But they were really important for my career.
So find your mentoring network, that support.
The other I would say to people, and I often hear this from students who are from marginalized
backgrounds, this whole concept of imposter syndrome.
And I feel like an imposter.
And I would say that, again, most people I've talked to in the academy, at some point in
their career, felt like an imposter.
So know that you've been invited into that room for a reason.
So just show up and be your authentic self.
So those are my two pieces of advice.
Brian, such a pleasure to have you here.
Thanks very much.
Oh, thank you, John.
Thank you very much.