Connie Kasari, Ph.D. is Professor in the Division of Psychological Studies in Education in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences. She has supervised the doctoral training of over 30 Ph.D. students and the research of four postdoctoral fellows. Dr. Kasari’s research has focused on social-emotional and cognitive development in typical and atypical children. She has a particular interest in affective development and caregiver-child interactions with a focus on mental retardation and developmental psychopathology. Prior to her appointment in Education, she was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Marian Sigman, collaborating on a number of research studies on autism and Down syndrome. Dr. Kasari continues this collaboration with an intervention project in Dr. Sigman’s original CPEA center grant at UCLA and now its continuation. Dr. Karsari also is Principal Investigator on an innovative treatments project funded by NIMH. Her most recent work has centered on treatment studies of social and communication behavior in children with autism, and she continues this line of inquiry in her current CART project on peer interactions. Dr. Kasari received her doctorate in education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in child development at UCLA prior to joining the UCLA faculty in 1990.