In the six years since Vanderbilt University launched a fellowship program to teach Ph.D. students to connect their research to the study of neurodiversity, the program has graduated about 24 Ph.D.s who are autistic. Founder Keivan Stassun believes the program, called Neurodiversity Inspired Science and Engineering, may produce more autistic scientists and engineers than any other doctoral program in the world.
NISE is open to students who are neurotypical as well as those who are neurodivergent, meaning their brains process information differently than most people’s. But from the beginning, Stassun said, he expected it would attract a lot of autistic students.
“We really thought of [NISE] as a kind of a win-win-win. One win being the basic engineering and science research that these students were conducting. Another win being for advancing solutions for autistic and neurodivergent people in science and engineering. And the third win being for these students themselves,” Stassun said. “We anticipated that … this would be a vehicle for helping to ensure good mentorship and community and success for autistic and neurodivergent Ph.D. students.”
But now, NISE is in danger due to funding pauses at the National Science Foundation. For its first six years, the program was funded by an NSF Research Traineeship Program grant. Last year, Stassun applied for new NSF funding, not only to continue NISE at Vanderbilt but also to expand it and other successful programs within the university’s Frist Center for Autism and Innovation to other institutions.
In January, Stassun said, he received notice from the agency that the FCAI would be awarded $4 million in funding. But since then, he’s gotten nothing but radio silence from the NSF; the funding, which was supposed to arrive in March, never came.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Funding Stops for NISE
In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the growing number of college students on the spectrum.
