“Early on I wanted to be a special needs kindergarten teacher, but I didn’t think I could handle university,” says PhD candidate Karen Neary.  So, she attended college and went on to a career as an x-ray technician, which seemed perfectly fine until her suspicion about her young son’s autism was confirmed.  “That changed everything” she states. With no services available for autistic children in the Georgia community where she lived with her family at the time, Karen took the situation into her own hands. “I decided to learn all that I could about autism. I traveled to many conferences, read many articles and text books on autism intervention.”

Over a decade later, the journey that began with a personal imperative to help her child has led to an exceptionally full life which includes running her own business dedicated to autism intervention and doctoral studies. And while she never really intended to go so far in academia, Karen discovered that one degree and then the next (all at Waterloo) fuelled a growing desire to research and understand more about human cognitive development.

“After my MASc I did stop school and set-up my company” she explains “and I needed to have a Master’s to do this – for both the training it provided and the initials behind my name.”  Karen’s Waterloo-based Centre for Autism and Related Exceptionalities (www.care-autism.com ) clearly responds to a great need for autism intervention and parent training, and yet she soon realized how much she “really missed the research” associated with graduate studies and academia.

Winning a substantial NSERC doctoral scholarship, Karen headed into the PhD program in which she is expanding her MASc research on children's understanding of ownership. “Specifically, I’m interested in how children and adults differ in their intuitions about ownership. I have become fascinated in learning how ‘typical’ children seem to understand certain concepts despite there being no evidence of how they could have been explicitly taught.” This research is conducted from the Child Cognition Lab run by Karen’s supervisor, Dr Ori Friedman. In the lab, Karen is one of two PhD students who are assisted by a team of six undergrads. The study includes visiting “daycare centres pretty much every day of the week” to test children’s responses to ownership scenarios developed by Karen and Dr Friedman.

“I really appreciate Ori’s unique approach” Karen comments about her supervisor, “he had me start testing and observing what children do long before I began reading the existing literature in the area. And this really helped me form my own opinions and question the literature.” In observing how sense of ownership develops from strict ‘ownership bias’ to consideration of circumstances, Karen explains that she is “studying a wide range of types of property disputes, switching back and forth between adult’s and children’s situations.” And interestingly, though she is not investigating legal concepts of ownership, she has noticed that certain laws of ownership align with the instinctive sense of ownership held by very young children.

While her initial academic goal was to better understand special needs children, Karen’s graduate work is now less concentrated in the area because she “wanted to understand what ‘typical’ children do and how they learn.” The research has already proven very helpful in her professional work, as she explains “now, when I design programs for children with autism, I understand what typical children are doing and then figure out what needs to be done to get autistic children to that point.”

Impressively, Karen balances her work and doctoral studies with raising her large blended family together with her husband. And she fully intends to maintain the balancing act by combining practice and research. “I would love to use my doctoral degree in two ways: to obtain an academic position and continue conducting studies and teaching; and to continue working in autism intervention -- with the credibility of my degrees standing behind me.”

 June 2009
Wendy Philpott