Laurie Vismara, Ph.D.

Post Doctoral Scholar Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Laurie A. Vismara is an educational psychologist and certified behavior analyst at the M.I.N.D. Institute, University of California, Davis. She specializes in providing early intervention and conducting treatment research with young children with autism and their families. She is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Sally Rogers. Her postdoctoral training includes studying early social and communicative development, early diagnosis in high-risk infants with symptomatic signs of autism, and treatment efficacy via the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), a developmental-based parent training intervention program for newly diagnosed infants and toddlers with autism. Additional treatment and research goals include examining the effectiveness of the ESDM manualized parent training intervention program for young children with autism when it is delivered in community settings.

She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studied with Drs. Robert and Lynn Koegel at the Koegel Autism Center. During her graduate training, she received extensive clinical experience in implementing Pivotal Response Training in both school and home-based intervention programs for children with autism. She has published research articles evaluating the use of motivational strategies to improve the quality of social interactions between young children with autism and their primary caregivers and to promote friendship development between older children and adolescents with autism and their typically developing peers.