I am presenting on April 18- if you are interested in the topic, you are welcome to join: Mind the NIH-Funding Gap: Structural Discrimination in Physical Health-Related Research for Cognitively Able Autistic Adults
Description: In this webinar, Dr. McDonald will discuss the lack of NIH-funded research focused on physical health disparity conditions in autistic adults. Using data from the NIH RePORTER (a publicly available government spending transparency tool), we used 30 major health disparity terms (e.g., insomnia, cardiovascular disease) paired with the terms “autism” and “adult” to investigate grants funded by the NIH on these conditions. In four decades, the NIH had not funded a single grant aimed with improving any of the 30 health disparity conditions in autistic adults. Only four grants met criteria for inclusion and these only generally examined physical health disparity conditions (e.g., investigation of electronic health records). We describe three process nodes that contribute to structural discrimination in grant funding for studies on physical health in cognitively-able autistic adults. These nodes include a) explicitly discriminatory funding priorities; b) discrimination in the more refined set of funding priorities as described by program officers and directors; and c) a culture of NIH-funded academia that discourages early career researchers from investigating, reporting, and decrying structural disability discrimination in NIH funding. https://airpnetwork.ucla.edu/events/monthly-webinars
Spectrum for Life Research 