Autism Higher Education Foundation

Scientific/Educational Advisory Board

Peter Mundy, Ph.D.

Dr. Mundy is a developmental and clinical psychologist who has been working on defining the nature of autism for the past 26 years. His work in this area began in 1981 at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. His studies with collaborator Marian Sigman contributed to the current understanding that joint attention impairments are part of the fundamental features of the early onset of social deficits of children with autism. This observation has contributed to improvements in the early identification and the diagnosis of autism.

For the past 16 years Dr. Mundy has held the position of Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. He is the founding Director of the University of Miami Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, which serves over 3000 children and families. He is also the Founding Co-Director of the Marino Autism Research Institute with Wendy Stone at Vanderbilt University. He is actively engaged in the study of the neurodevelopment of joint attention in young children with autism and typical development, and has recently begun to turn his attention to understanding and treating problems in the social and emotional development encountered by higher functioning children and adolescents with autism. The National Institute of Mental Health currently funds his work on this topic.

Dr Mundy is presently the Lisa Capps Chair in Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Education in the School of Education and The M.I.N.D Institute at the University of California at Davis. Dr. Mundy is currently working on a book titled, Our Sharing Minds: Attention, Joint Attention and Social Cognition in Development and Autism to be published by Guildford Publications in 2008.

Dr. Mundy has been selected as a Member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Advisory Committees to both the Collaborative Programs of Excellence in Autism (CPEA) and to the Studies to Advance Autism Research and Treatment (STAART).