Hans wants that pressure to increase. He also believes it is important that policymakers know how to act in ways that actually lead to positive results. His research therefore does not only identify discrimination and inaccessibility, but also asks what practical steps can be taken by policymakers, institutions, and professional groups.

His work connects to wider legal and political developments. A petition on this subject was presented to the Dutch Parliament on 30 September 2025. The European Parliament also adopted a resolution on 4 October 2023 to better protect the rights and wellbeing of autistic people.

Hans is also preparing a book on this subject, including practical information that can be applied across different professional fields. His contribution to the Science Conference brings together policy experience, legal awareness, and a clear call for better protection against discrimination faced by neurodivergent people.

The Program for Supporting Autistic Social Entrepreneurs has been purposefully designed to provide disability service providers, social enterprise support services, and business support services with the knowledge and skills to assist autistic social entrepreneurs in a strengths-based and neurodiversity-affirming manner.

The program consists of three units:

• What is Autism?
• Autistic Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Autistic Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Sharon’s fellowship investigation focuses on four central questions:

• How does participation in the program impact the practice of participants in supporting autistic social entrepreneurs?
• How does participation in the program impact the practice of the organisations and communities that participants interact with?
• What enabling factors and blocking factors affect participants’ ability to implement and disseminate the principles contained within the program?
• What interventions need to be developed to amplify the enabling factors and dampen the blocking factors that have been identified?

Alongside his research, Aaron works as a lived-experience researcher and Neuro-Inclusive Senior Project Officer at UNSW. He also co-founded the Diversified Project, a nationally recognised neuroinclusive education initiative that began as a small co-production group of students and staff and developed into a peer-reviewed, award-winning programme operating across the sector.

Through a national audit of 42 Australian universities, Aaron has been mapping where Universal Design for Learning genuinely exists in practice, and where it remains mostly present on paper. His fellowship research focuses on the gap between institutional commitments and the actual experience of students navigating higher education systems.

His investigation asks four central questions:

• What does authentic UDL 3.0 implementation look like across Australian universities?
• How can universities distinguish genuine accessibility work from performative compliance?
• Which structural, cultural, and policy-level factors enable or block neuroinclusive practice?
• What patterns of adoption across the sector could inform a scalable, evidence-based framework?

Aaron describes his path into research as beginning with advocacy and survival. As a first-generation, mature-age student, he researches for students whose experiences mirror his own: neurodivergent students navigating systems that were not originally designed with them in mind.

Elena’s path has been shaped by more than a decade of working with neurodivergent children and their families. She first worked as a preschool teacher in Shanghai, and later as a special educator and early intervention specialist in New York and Sydney. Across these cultural contexts, she observed recurring intergenerational patterns of psychosis, particularly around hallucinations and differentiated sensory systems.

These observations also resonated with her own experiences, including postpartum psychosis. Later, she was able to connect what she had witnessed, along with other episodes, to lived-experience perspectives. Diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and C-PTSD further opened her awareness that genetic and environmental factors may be significant, unspoken risk factors.

In a recent manuscript exploring her own sleep paralysis, Elena examines how cultural narratives shape hallucinatory experiences. Her Hispanic heritage gave her the language, “se me subió el muerto”, to make sense of that terror in a way that neurobiology alone could not. For Elena, stigma thrives in a vacuum and is dismantled when people can name their experiences and see them reflected in their communities.

Her current project tests whether elevated hallucination risk in autism is driven by three interconnected pathways: sensory processing differences, trauma, and shared genetic factors. If sensory sensitivity is confirmed as a key pathway, this could improve early detection and lead to more affirming, culturally informed interventions. Elena’s goal is to translate this work into real-world resources that help prevent crises and challenge stigma, particularly for women, neurodivergent individuals, and non-Westernized populations whose stories are too often left out of research.

In her research, Friederike investigates interpersonal coordination, for instance in eye gaze or speech, across neurodiversity, as well as in human-human and human-machine interaction. A defining feature of this work is its participatory approach. She sees inclusion not only as a social responsibility, but as a methodological necessity for advancing science.

In partnership with autistic people, Friederike has helped revise and validate a measure of autistic traits, the CATI-R, with the aim of creating a tool that is accessible, non-stigmatising, and sensitive to a wide range of individual experiences.

Her interest in interpersonal coordination is not only academic, but also deeply personal. Alongside her scientific training, she has worked for many years as a dance instructor. In dance, coordination is lived, embodied, and relational. Subtle shifts in timing, rhythm, breath, and gaze can create a sense of connection that is immediately felt, even if it is difficult to put into words.

Dance also sensitised Friederike to diversity. Different bodies coordinate differently. Rather than asking whether someone can coordinate “normally”, she is interested in how coordination emerges between specific partners, and under which conditions it flourishes.

As a Research Fellow with the Neurodiversity Foundation, Friederike is conducting research on nutrition and eating behaviour in autistic adults, particularly autistic women and gender-diverse people. This project seeks to identify mechanisms that shape everyday experiences around food, sensory preferences, routines, and wellbeing. A central goal is to translate the findings into a practical, community-informed digital resource that supports autonomy and wellbeing while remaining grounded in lived experience.

This year, Nedward is excited to bring back the Neurodiversity Pride Game Jam: an event where people of any experience level can come together and make games. Whether someone has never designed a game before or has designed many, the aim is to make the game jam accessible and welcoming.

This year’s game jam is a week-long event where everyone is encouraged to make a game about neurodiverse experiences. There will also be talks before the game jam, as well as an opening and closing ceremony to bring people together and share resources.

The intent of the game jam is to encourage neurodiverse people to express themselves through the medium of games. Creativity and self-expression can be forms of advocacy, and when someone puts a game into the world and another person relates to it, that connection can be powerful.

In this fellowship, they are examining a critical question: how might we design communication tools using creative methodologies, such as colour-coding, symbols, or verbal metaphors, to facilitate cross-neurotype dialogue within workplace settings?

Imagine a typical workplace conversation. One person may speak directly and literally, while another relies on contextual cues and implication. Misunderstandings may occur, not because anyone is doing it wrong, but because people process information through fundamentally different pathways. These everyday disconnections can accumulate into systemic barriers that exclude neurodivergent people and limit their capacity for self-advocacy.

Over the past few weeks, Jasmine and Valentina have partnered with a London-based organisation at the intersection of neurodiversity and community. Together, they discovered that communication gaps cannot be bridged by focusing on the individual alone.

Instead, their study addresses what they call “the triangle”: the relational ecosystem of carer, employer, and career coach surrounding the neurodivergent person. Neuroinclusivity occurs when all stakeholders have the resources to understand and respond appropriately to diverse communication styles.

Their work asks what might happen if workplace dialogue were approached as a creative practice. Through co-design and iterative user testing, they are developing flexible mechanisms and adaptive frameworks grounded in neurodivergent lived experiences.

About ten years ago, Evelyn came across a simple idea: confidence begins with facing what you fear. For her, that meant writing her stories instead of hiding them. That moment opened the door to unmasking, which has deepened over the last five years as she has begun discovering the person she is beneath those early assumptions.

The research question guiding her work is: How does early misidentification shape self-understanding in neurodivergent adults, and what does the process of unmasking and discovering oneself look like later in life? This question continues to evolve as Evelyn learns from others and deepens her understanding throughout the fellowship.

This project explores how adults build a sense of self after experiencing misunderstanding or misidentification in childhood. Evelyn is especially interested in the emotional and identity-level shifts that happen during unmasking, and in how lived experience can illuminate the gaps in support many people faced while growing up. Her hope is that this work helps others navigating similar journeys feel seen, validated, and less alone.

Through a close partnership with a single research collaborator, Žaneta’s work has led her to understand artistic processes as inherently and highly social. While this kind of social action necessarily operates within normative institutional models, it also opens new horizons.

She investigates the factors that make neurodiverse creative collaboration difficult on a relational level. More importantly, she focuses on the specific strategies that neurodivergent individuals and collectives use to navigate these challenges. These strategies do not aim to “fix” individual deficits. Instead, they are sophisticated methods of personalising the creative process, where ableist and capitalist ideals are actively deconstructed and turned into practice.

In this sense, neurodivergent artistry can provide a vital mirror to rigid, normative social habits. By overcoming the mostly discursive and standardised needs of “typical sociality,” Žaneta’s research partner draws attention to bodily experience and distributed cognitive practices as valid and profound ways of being social.

The goal of this research is to recognise the deconstruction of the deficit narrative in practice. By understanding how these strategies are implemented, Žaneta’s work opens the question to a wider field within ableist society, from workplaces to personal relationships. It emphasises embodied and embedded cognitive-social experience as a source of alternatives to hegemonic social expectations, and recognises neurodivergent artistry as a cornerstone of future social and creative structures.

As a postdoc in computer science, Thomas researches Large Language Model-based conversational agents: chatbots that can train and assist skills at scale. These tools can support people in practicing social situations, building habits to get work done, and engaging in collaborative problem solving.

In this sense, conversational agents may become tools that meaningfully support the blind spots of neurodiverse individuals at work.

Alongside this research, Thomas is in the early stages of a personal project designed to help people identify their cognitive fingerprint and improve the fit between who they are and how they work.

With the Neurodiversity Foundation, Itzel is leading a community-based study on neurodivergent women’s work and non-work relationships in today’s communication landscape. This research explores how neurodivergent women experience relationships and communication across work and life, and how connection, role demands, and communication methods shape belonging, sustainability, and wellbeing.

Beyond this fellowship research, Itzel mentors first-year and graduating college students, speaks publicly, and helps organizations diagnose and repair workplace friction points, especially for high-capacity women carrying more than anyone can see.

She is also recruiting for her doctoral study, Exploring How Latina Women in STEM Describe Their Experiences of Work-Life Balance and Organizational Support While Working Remotely. In addition, she is running another community study, the Mixed Women’s Identity, Work, and Leadership Survey, in collaboration with several organizations. That project centres the experiences of Afro-Latina and mixed women, including Black and white biracial, Afro-Indigenous, Afro-Asian, and other multiracial identities.

Across all of this work, Itzel’s goal stays the same: to understand the realities, barriers, and dreams of communities so that events, tools, and opportunities can be designed to honour people’s full selves, not only the version that is easiest to categorise.

Outside of research, she enjoys speaking and mentoring, especially BIPOC college students, and supporting women, neurodivergent people, and military families navigating diagnosis, because access, support, and intellectual kinship can change people’s trajectories in real time.

Navigating this mismatch often requires speaking up about individual needs. At the same time, stigma, uncertainty, or a lack of shared understanding can make this difficult, limiting open dialogue and, ultimately, meaningful belonging and inclusion.

As part of her PhD research, Lena-Marie explores how organizations engage with neurodiversity in practice. Through conversations with employees across different roles, backgrounds, and neurotypes, she aims to better understand how neurodiversity is framed, supported, and enacted in everyday work, particularly through employee networks and internal communities.

Her goal is to contribute to a better understanding of how organizations can move beyond hiring toward creating more inclusive structures, practices, and environments that work for a wider range of people.

Even with years of advocacy and growing awareness, ADHD and neurodiversity are still widely misunderstood. Conversations often focus on perceived limitations while overlooking the ways neurodivergence can be a real strength. Many neurodivergent people bring extraordinary focus, persistence, and effort to their work, especially in systems that were not designed with neurodiverse thinkers in mind.

In Rebecca’s own experience, neurodivergence has influenced not only how she thinks, but also how she engages with problems, particularly through creative approaches, pattern recognition, and questioning norms around productivity and communication.

Before moving into the neurodiversity research space, Rebecca’s background was in education and family policy research. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University of Michigan and has spent her career studying how education and family-serving systems function in practice. Much of her work uses data to illuminate gaps between policy goals and lived experience, and she is especially drawn to systems-level questions that can lead to more thoughtful and responsive policy.

As a Fellow with the Neurodiversity Foundation, Rebecca’s current research focuses on how supports are delivered to neurodiverse individuals in early educational settings. This work builds naturally on her previous research while opening new questions at the intersection of education, policy, and neurodiversity.

V’s research project, “The Price of Disclosure: Power, Retaliation, & Resilience for Autistic and AuDHD Leaders,” examines what happens when Autistic and AuDHD leaders disclose their disability in the workplace across countries, industries, leadership levels, and intersectional identities.

Specifically, the study looks at:

• Patterns in outcomes across contexts and identities
• Why and when leaders choose to disclose
• What factors protect, support, or undermine them
• How organizational power structures respond

By analysing the experiences of leaders worldwide, V’s research aims to generate tools that can help Autistic and AuDHD leaders assess risk, build resilience, and empower allies and organizations with strategies to change systems.

Disabled leaders should not have to disappear to earn a place in the world or workforce. V’s contribution to the conference asks how we can build safer, more equitable structures of power for all.