Congratulations to Dr. Stelios Georgiades for his new role as inaugural Chair of the McMaster Children’s Hospital Chair in Autism and Neurodevelopment.

Georgiades, is involved in several KBHN research projects and also who serves on the KBHN Research Training Committee. His new position represents a partnership between McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences with support from the Canadian Autism Spectrum Disorders Alliance, Autism Speaks Canada, Autism Ontario and the Sinneave Family Foundation. This partnership aims to expand collaborative activities that relate to advocacy, policy, and research.

“This new role is a coordinated effort by both academic and healthcare institutions to bridge the research to practice gap in autism as well as other neurodevelopmental disabilities,” says Dr. Georgiades. “This chair is a recognition of the need to integrate different sectors and bring down the silos of healthcare.”

Dr. Georgiades has spent nearly two decades researching Autism. He began his research journey in 2003 when he was a research assistant for Dr. Peter Szatmari. He remembers meeting a family whose four-year-old son had recently been diagnosed with Autism and felt so inspired by the strength and positivity the family embodied that he decided then and there to commit his professional career to researching Autism.

Since then, Dr. Georgiades founded and co-directed the McMaster Autism Research Team (MacART) and has been a strong voice in the fight for a National Autism Strategy. He has been involved in research projects across the country, including several supported by KBHN. One of these projects is Pathways in Autism Spectrum Disorder, which launched in 2004 and was funded by KBHN from 2010-2015.

This project is one of the longest-running longitudinal studies capturing data on the development of young children and adolescents with Autism in the world. Here, researchers followed children into adolescence to learn how factors relating to their family, intervention and the community have affected their development.

One of the key projects supported by Dr. Georgiades’ new role is the Pediatric Autism Research Cohort (PARC) Study, which is taking lessons learned from Pathways and expanding by following more families who are navigating the healthcare system. Researchers will follow up to 1000 young children across six partner sites. Each child is younger than six years old and received an autism diagnosis within six months of participating.

“We’re trying to understand [the children’s] developmental trajectories, the factors that shape those trajectories and how services and interventions across sites and within sites influence how these children grow and develop over time,” says Dr. Georgiades.

Another project supported by the McMaster Children’s Hospital Chair in Autism and Neurodevelopment involves creating a pan-Canadian learning health system for neurodevelopmental disorders. This project brings together key groups—including KBHN—to bridge the gap between what is being learned and achieved in research versus what actions are being taken to improve patient care in Canada’s healthcare system.

The McMaster Children’s Hospital Chair in Autism and Neurodevelopment provides Georgidades with the opportunity to take what he’s learned about Autism over nearly two decades and find ways of building frameworks for all children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. He says the Chair purposely excludes the word “disorders” and “disabilities” to emphasize that his team will be taking a strengths-based approach in their research.

“We see so many similarities across kids with neurodevelopmental disabilities, so the idea of a cross-diagnostic approach might be useful in terms of research but especially in terms of clinical care and policy,” says Dr. Georgiades. “This becomes especially important if you take a strengths-based approach because focusing on a kid’s strength means the diagnostic boundaries become less important.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Georgiades on his achievements and new position.

By: Vanessa Hrvatin (Freelance Writer)