Dr. Connor Kerns discusses emerging findings on the relationship between trauma and autism.

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Dr. Connor Kerns has conducted and published studies on broad array of topics including the role of paternal age in ASD risk, the cooccurrence of childhood psychopathologies, and differential predictors of CBT efficacy for child anxiety. Her present research focuses on the overlap, assessment and treatment of anxiety and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Her ongoing projects aim to explore the varied presentation and phenomenology of anxiety in ASD and the implications of this variation for effective anxiety measurement and treatment. Dr. Kerns is also preparing to extend this work to the understudied area of traumatic events and their sequelae in youth with ASD. Another area of interest is the use of technology to facilitate the dissemination of empirically based treatments. Dr. Kerns is currently working to develop costeffective, computerassisted CBTs for youth with ASD and anxiety, interactive social stories to improve skill generalization in ASD, and videoenhanced ASD screening and educational tools. Her long terms goals include developing a parsimonious model of psychiatric cooccurrence to inform the design and dissemination of crossdiagnostic assessments and treatments that will improve child wellbeing and development.