Ruth B. Grossman

Ruth B. Grossman is a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Emerson College and director of the FACE Lab. Her work is focused on face-to-face communication in autistic and neurotypical individuals within the framework of double-empathy, attempting to better understand the impact of how the nuances in our verbal, facial, and vocal expressions are perceived and understood by others within and across neurotype.

During the fellowship, Grossman is working to establish a broader context for the intersectionality of female gender and autism and challenge the assumption of a 4:1 male gender ratio in autism. The project’s aim is to provide a roadmap for better inclusion of autistic females in research, advocacy, and service delivery.

Grossman’s research has been supported by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Her work has been published in high-impact journals, including Autism, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and Scientific Reports (published by Nature Portfolio). At Emerson College, Grossman’s contributions have been recognized with the Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award and the Helaine and Stanley Miller Award for Outstanding Teaching. She earned a PhD in neuro-linguistics from Boston University, where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Teaching Fellow for the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Boston University School of Medicine.