Second Keynote Address: Autism Autonomy: In Search of our Human Dignity
Time
12:45-1:30 PM
Presenter/Facilitator
Elizabeth Torres, PhD
About the Course
Elizabeth Torres, PhD presents insights from her book "Autism Autonomy: In Search of our Human Dignity," a profound exploration of what it means to honor the full personhood of autistic individuals. In this keynote, Dr. Torres shares the importance of her research for amplifying autistic agency—centering the voices, choices, and self-determination of those on the spectrum.
Drawing on rigorous scientific inquiry and deep respect for lived experience, Torres challenges systems and frameworks that reduce autistic individuals to passive recipients of intervention. Instead, she argues for a paradigm shift: one that recognizes autonomy as foundational to dignity, and data-driven understanding as a tool for empowerment rather than control.
Key themes include:
Why autonomy matters: The ethical and practical case for supporting self-determination in all aspects of life—communication, movement, decision-making, and daily living
Research as advocacy: How objective measurement of sensory-motor processes can validate autistic experiences and challenge deficit-based narratives
From compliance to collaboration: Rethinking clinical, educational, and family relationships to prioritize partnership over correction
Amplifying agency: Strategies for creating environments, systems, and interactions that honor what autistic individuals are communicating—verbally and non-verbally.
Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the intersection between science and human rights, and a renewed commitment to practices that uplift rather than diminish autistic dignity. This keynote is a call to action: to listen more deeply, measure more thoughtfully, and advocate more boldly for a world where every autistic person's autonomy is recognized and protected.
Objectives:
Participants will explain the ethical case for supporting self-determination in all aspects of autistic life.
Participants will define language related to sensory-motor processing and measurement thereof, including but not limited to: vestibular, interoception, proprioception, sensory profile
Participants will integrate at least two strategies for creating environments that honor autistic autonomy.
Elizabeth Torres, PhD
Dr. Torres is a Computational Neuroscientist who has been working on theoretical and empirical aspects of sensory motor integration and human cognition since the late 90's. She graduated from Mathematics and Computer Science and spent a year at the NIH as a Pre-IRTA fellow, applying her skill set to the medical field. This work led to Pre-doctoral-fellowship funding (5 years) of graduate school. During her PhD at UCSD, she developed a new theoretical framework for the study of sensory motor integration, employing elements of Differential (Riemannian) geometry and tensor calculus adapted from Contemporary Mechanics and Dynamics to the realm of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Upon PhD completion, she moved to CALTECH to receive postdoctoral training in electrophysiology and Computational Neural Systems as a Sloan-Swartz Fellow, a Della Martin Fellow and a Neuroscience Scholar. In parallel, she translated her models to work with humans suffering from pathologies of the nervous systems and built a new platform for personalized analyses of human naturalistic behaviors.
She joined Rutgers University in 2008 and deployed her new platform to work on neurodevelopmental disorders with a focus on issues with social interactions. Under an NSF Cyber Enabled Discovery Award, she then launched a transformative research program in autism seeking to build synergies with industry, funded by the NSF Innovation Corps initiative. She filed four patent technologies and with the generous funding of the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation and the New Jersey Governor's Council for the treatment and research of autism, she extended the new platform to study natural dyadic and social behaviors in general.
Her lab's vision has paved the way to seek new frontiers in personalized mobile-Health, dynamic diagnostics systems and new objectively-driven drug development for clinical trials. The overarching goal of her group is to create the means to quantify and track improvements in the person's quality of life.