Search

Senior Research Fellow

Deputy Director (Research); Angela Wright Bennett Professor of Autism Research at The Kids Research Institute Australia; Director, CliniKids

Rachelle Wicks is a Research Fellow at CliniKids.

CliniKids has won the Excellence in Allied Health category at the inaugural National Disability Awards, announced in Melbourne tonight.

Five The Kids Research Institute Australia researchers working across diverse and highly impactful areas of child health research have been named as finalists for the 2023 Premier’s Science Awards.

Autism research is only as interpretable as the tools and practices used to evaluate change. Measurement determines what is counted as evidence, how needs are recognized, how change is evaluated, and how findings are compared across individuals, studies, and contexts.

The study aimed to evaluate the experiences of participants involved in co-production to develop a National Framework for assessing children's functional strengths and support needs. The National Framework was developed to guide professionals when working with children aged 0-12 years, including children who do and do not have one or more diagnosed condition(s), and their families in Australia and inform good policy across health, education, disability, and community support sectors.

Gathering Autistic young people's testimony is critical for understanding their lived experience of education and designing settings in which these students can thrive. Despite increasing knowledge in this field, we lack perspectives from a broad range of Autistic students which necessarily limits our ability to build inclusive, supportive environments for all. This study explored the educational experiences of preschool and school-aged Autistic students from diverse age groups, backgrounds, and educational settings.

Early intervention offers the potential to mitigate adult mental illness; however, trials spanning decades present significant challenges, necessitating predictive early markers useable in trial settings. We hypothesised that parent evaluation using the child behaviour checklist (CBCL) total problem score at age two years predicted adult depressive and anxious symptoms and explored other potential parent ratings.

Eye-tracking could expedite autism identification/diagnosis through standardisation and objectivity. We tested whether Gazefinder autism assessment, with Classification Algorithm derived from gaze fixation durations, would have good accuracy (area under the curve [AUC] ≥ 0.80) to differentiate 2-4-year-old autistic from non-autistic children.