Yun- Ju (Claire) Chen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University and a member of the McMaster Autism Research Team (MacART). She completed her PhD in Occupational Science at the University of Southern California in 2021. Before coming to North America, she was a pediatric occupational therapist in Taiwan working with children and youth with special needs across home, school, and clinical settings. Her research spans the fields of child psychiatry, occupational science/therapy, and developmental psychology, with a focus on autism. She is particularly interested in applying concepts and methods grounded upon developmental science (e.g., developmental variability and cascades) and occupational science (e.g., person-environment fit and transactions) to inform early identification and intervention for autism. 

In this developmental pediatric academic hour session, Claire reviews the common sensory behaviours in autistic children and the state-of-the-art of related research and presents recent findings from a population-based prospective study on developmental trajectories of sensory differences from infancy to school age and associated clinical outcomes. She also discusses the clinical implications of these findings for early identification and intervention in pediatric populations.