Diana L. Robins, Ph.D. is a Professor and the Director of the AJ Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University, where she founded the Research Program in Early Detection and Intervention for autism in 2014. The AJ Drexel Autism Institute at Drexel University was the first research center to focus on public health science of autism. The Autism Institute’s mission is to pioneer research to better understand autism and drive impactful change in our communities and worldwide.

Dr. Robins holds secondary appointments in Community Health and Prevention in the Dornsife School of Public Health and Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University. Much of her work has centered around developing, validating, and refining a widely-used screening tool for ASD, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, or M-CHAT. The original M-CHAT paper has been cited more than 2400 times. The validation study of the screener’s revision, M-CHAT-R with Follow-Up (M-CHAT-R/F), demonstrated that the 2-stage screening questionnaire detects many cases of autism, and children in the study were diagnosed about two years younger than the national median, which improves access to ASD-specific early intervention. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis reports on 50 studies using M-CHAT or M-CHAT-R/F across the globe. Current studies in Dr. Robins’s lab examine the relationship between early detection of autism strategies in primary care and outcomes for autistic children.

Dr. Robins’s research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Autism Speaks, and the National Institute of Mental Health, among others. Her work has been published in leading pediatric and autism journals. In recent years, she served as the Treasurer on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Autism Research, and as a panel member for the Child Psychology and Developmental Disorders study section at the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Robins received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology, with an emphasis in Clinical Neuropsychology from the University of Connecticut. Following her APA-approved internship at the University of Florida Health Sciences Center, Dr. Robins completed a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine Child Study Center. She then spent 10 years on the faculty at Georgia State University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Institute, before moving to Drexel University in 2014. She is delighted that the AJ Drexel Autism Institute draws students from public health, psychology, and medicine to work together on public health approaches to improving the lives of autistic individuals and their loved ones.