Before we get too far into 2021, I thought I’d write a thread recapping some of the research that came out of my lab in 2020. Most of this work was led by my talented team of graduate students, Kerrianne Morrison, @kmdebrabander, and @DesiRJones.

Back in January, a news story was published about Kerrianne’s study showing improved social interaction outcomes for autistic adults when paired with another autistic partner. https://t.co/3hct0yZ3Ly
A detailed thread about the study and a link to the paper can be found here (feel free to DM me your email address if you’d like a copy of the full paper for this study or any of our studies): https://t.co/Sc7B2ob6h0
Another paper published early in 2020 (it appeared a few months earlier online) showed that traditional standalone tasks of social cognition are less predictive of functional and social skills among autistic adults than commonly assumed in autism research. https://t.co/96HTjX75Rk
Next, @kmdebrabander led and published an innovative study about how well autistic and non-autistic adults can predict their own cognitive and social cognitive performance. https://t.co/GbDkZzNe67
Meanwhile, @DesiRJones was making huge strides highlighting how the woeful underrepresentation of Black scientists and Black autistic people within autism research affects cultural assumptions and clinical practice. https://t.co/0V1H0eS9Mt
Desi also hosted this powerful round table about the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx autistic adults. https://t.co/KNOjygLZcd
She then participated in this thoughtful podcast produced by @Spectrum about being Black in autism research. https://t.co/SnoArruJ3a
Our lab then published a paper supporting the “double empathy theory” by @milton_damian showing that traditional measures and notions of social skill, social motivation, and social cognition have almost no relation to the real-world social interaction outcomes of autistic adults. https://t.co/2ZyK3qIkr8
My lab isn’t an island, though! We continue to pursue collaborations with wonderful colleagues around the country (and now internationally as well! @cjcrompton @SueReviews among others). For instance...
I was thrilled to be part of this incisive and righteous paper led by @KristenBott about avoiding ableist language when taking about and researching autism. https://t.co/sC3MxSVdql
I’m also so lucky to continue to work with @ClareHarropPhD and colleagues examining sex differences in social and non-social attention in autistic children. We have a series of papers on this topic. Here’s the latest that came@out this year: https://t.co/BNluinj2gx
We have several other papers coming out soon, including a really important (IMO) study led by @DesiRJones testing how well an autism acceptance “intervention” for non-autistic adults reduces explicit and implicit biases about autism. Stay tuned!

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This is the $1mln question still without an answer: why were these workers cleaning bat guano from that abandoned mine?

Surprisingly we simply don't know.

China would have all interest in clarifying that point if for instance they were prospecting or selling guano. It did not.


What we know is that EcoHealth + WIV were sampling bat sites in the vicinity at the exact time of the workers being in that mine.

#DRASTIC wrote about this and about other oddities in the official story:

Maybe it's just one of these coincidences.

Then it gets interesting: about a year after the miners death, Olival & Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance co-authored a paper about the coronavirus risk infection from bat guano collection.

No mention of the

That paper oddly used some old bat samples collected by DARPA in 2006/7 at the famous Thai bat cave.

It never mentioned that the Thai monks have been doing this every Sunday for many many years without infection.

But most interestingly it never mentioned the Mojiang mine accident, even if the perfect timing and recycling of old DARPA bat samples seem to point to a likely knowledge of it.

Anyway, the idea was to ask for more money, as you correctly

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