Nachman Awarded Spencer Foundation Grant to Further Study of Autistic College Students

Brett Ranon Nachman, a first-year assistant professor of adult and lifelong learning in the College of Education and Health Professions, was recently awarded a prestigious Spencer Foundation Large Research Grant as co-principal investigator of a nationwide study of autistic college student success. The grant is for nearly $500,000 over the next three years.

Over the past seven years, Nachman, alongside principal investigator Bradley E. Cox, who will be joining Michigan State University’s higher, adult, and lifelong education program, have dedicated much of their scholarship around autism in higher education, having published in leading journals including Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and The Review of Higher Education.

This new grant allows Nachman and Cox, leaders of “Project PEACES (Postsecondary Education: Autistic College Students’ Experiences of Success)” to scale up their efforts as they and their colleagues work to uncover how autistic undergraduate students across the United States define success across various domains of their lives. Previously the duo and their research team have secured funding from The FAR Fund ($90,000) and the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University ($27,500).

Both Nachman and Cox bring their personal and professional expertise to this work: Nachman as an autistic researcher who has traversed higher education as a student, scholar, and educator, whereas Cox is the father of an autistic teenage son and founder of the College Autism Network (CAN), which provides advocacy, research, and training around autism in higher education. CAN, for which Nachman serves as its director of research, offers resources and webinars for those who support autistic college students and represent self-advocates, as well as stages the annual College Autism Summit.

In its first year, Project PEACES has yielded the largest sample of autistic college students to date for a study in which the instrument centered strictly on autism in higher education: 430 students across the United States completed the survey in the fall of 2022. Starting at that same time, Cox and Nachman will expand the project to include interviews and photo gathering. These methods will enable the team to gain more nuanced understandings of how autistic college students make sense of their successes.

Project PEACES promises to be the largest-scale study of its kind to specifically focus on autistic college students and, importantly, honor the various dimensions of their lives, including mental health, employment, academics, identity development, and social experiences. With this Spencer Foundation grant, Cox, Nachman, and team are providing the foundation to widen study participation, infrastructure, personnel, and methodological approaches. Ultimately, they seek to build a broadly accessible database that would enable additional researchers to conduct their own inquiries related to autistic college students.

In addition to Nachman and Cox, the Project PEACES team includes research team members Kristen Gillespie-Lynch (College of Staten Island), Emily Raclaw (Marquette University), Julie Lounds Taylor (Vanderbilt University), and Nicholas W. Gelbar (University of Connecticut), along with autistic advisory board members Lydia X. Z. Brown, Kelly Bron Johnson, and Kayden Stockwell.