News

2025

April: Megan, Marianne and Georgia attended the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) annual meeting this month. We shared ShARL's work on diagnostic disclosure, evaluation of the ICF strength and needs assessment, understanding an tackling barriers to employment, and a meta-synthesis on the reasons why Autistic students are more likely to drop-out from higher education.

March: Megan presented at the Colt Foundation Research Impact Seminar in Manchester.

February: We are excited to announce that our NIHR funded Programme Development Grant entitled: Participatory Systems Mapping with Underserved Autistic Adults: Co-Designing Health and Social Care Solutions Through Creative Arts has launched this month. Welcome to Victoria Newell who will be working with us and Disability Sheffield as a Research Associate on this project

January: It has been great to meet with colleagues at Employment for Everyone to discuss new collaborations and to contribute to Growth Accelerator Design workshops led by the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority.

2024

December: We held our final steering group meeting for our Colt Foundation project on tackling the barriers to employment for Autistic people this month. We've really benefitted from the insights of this group and were pleased to share initial findings on the evaluation of our co-produced web-based intervention aimed at employers. Our paper on understanding and tackling the barriers to employment is now published.

November: Welcome to Oriyomi (Yomi) Shittu who will be working with ShARL 1 day per week as part of his consultant psychiatrist training. We also learnt a lot and made some great connections at the Sheffield Inclusive Employment Forum this month.

October: Welcome to Beatrix Butnicu & Georgia Smith who have joined ShARL as full-time PhD students. 

September: Congratulations to Charlotte Grahame for publishing her DClinPsy empirical project in Autism in Adulthood.

July: We are looking forward to running our ShARL conference on the 18th July. Details and online sign ups can be found on our Events page.

June: It was a great pleasure for Marianne Day and Megan Freeth to attend the Faculty of Occupational Medicine's Annual Scientific Meeting in Belfast, to present the results of the Colt-funded project: Understanding and Tackling the Barriers to Employment Experienced by Autistic Adults.

May: Congratulations to Laura Smethurst for publishing her DClinPsy empirical project in Autism in Adulthood.

April: Megan attended the Colt Foundation annual conference. What a great opportunity to learn about a wide variety of research aiming to improve health and well being at work.

March: Some exciting funding news this month, we've been awarded two new NIHR funded projects! Details to follow once all contracts are signed.

February: Dan presented his work on Open Science in Autism research at the Royal Society

January: We have launched data collection on our ICF CoreSets for Autism UK normalisation sample study.  

2023

August: We are delighted to have received QR policy funding to support our collaboration with Autistica which will look at the utility of the ICF CoreSets for Autism in the UK

July: Congratulations to Jiayi Chen, who has passed his PhD viva with minor corrections. Jiayi's thesis was entitled A cross-cultural study of autism stigma and camouflage in the UK and China 

June: Welcome to Dr Marianne Day who will be working on a Colt Foundation funded project entitled: Understanding and Tackling the Barriers to Employment Experienced by Autistic Adults

May: It was a great privilege to attend INSAR and share our findings on What Autistic Adults want from Post-diagnostic Support. This work will be published in Autism soon! Also, congratulations to Louis Stokes, who has passed his PhD viva with minor corrections. Louis' thesis was entitled The impact of MYT1L-syndrome on behaviour and cognition  

April: Attendance at the SBRI Healthcare annual conference enabled us to share findings on our pilot work on the ICF CoreSets for Autism web platform in the UK

March:  Congratulations to Rosie Wilson DClinPsy on publishing work from her thesis: The experience of seeking, receiving, and reflecting upon a diagnosis of autism in the UK: A meta-synthesis of qualitative studies conducted with autistic individuals 

February: Pleased that our chapter on Autism Across the World will be published in the Handbook for Autism 5th Edition

January: It was great to present at the Psychonomics and EPS joint symposium on Cognition in the “real-world”: How, Why and What next?