Helen Tager-Flusberg

The following is the Department’s tribute to Professor Tager-Flusberg upon her retirement.

We thank Helen Tager-Flusberg for her continuing dedication to her field of research and her many contributions to our department and Boston University over the course of her career. In academia internationally, Helen’s name is pretty much synonymous with early autism research. She is not just a star of the field, she is one of the originators of the field and in recognition of this in 2021 she was the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Autism Research, a society for which she also served as President back in 2011-2013. She has also been elected to fellowship in APS and AAAS.

For over 40 years, Professor Tager-Flusberg has conducted research not only on autism but other neurodevelopmental and genetic disorders such as developmental language disorders, Williams , Prader Willi, and Downs syndrome, adopting the unique perspective of a developmental psychologist in attempting to understand the emergence and developmental trajectories of these disorders, variability in their phenotypic expressions and what predicts this variability—with particular emphasis on the familial risk factors that might aid early detection and thus also, very importantly, emphasis on early intervention.

Professor Tager-Flusberg is an author or coauthor of over 250 journal articles, editor of 6 books including the classic and republished volume with Simon Baron-Cohen, “Understanding other minds” and awardee of more than 50 grants. Her work in autism has spanned all levels of analysis: behavioral, neural, genetic, and thus has adopted a range of techniques: experimental and observational, eye tracking, imaging, in the home and in the CARE lab to understand motor, cognitive, social-cognitive, linguistic communicative profiles in some of the most challenging populations, for example low verbal autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Helen’s capacities to form intellectual synergies and engage in cross-disciplinary cross-institutional collaborations is well-renowned as is her striking range of service to the field. Her capacity to galvanize action is astonishing and is perhaps encapsulated by the recognition represented by the award she received in 2012 for one of only three NIH Autism Centers for Excellence (ACE)–ACE, the CARE Center that she established in our department not long after she joined our department in 2010 from the BU Medical School.

It is worth noting that before Helen joined our department there was no Developmental Science Program at Boston University. With Helen’s leadership, organizational prowess, and acute political sense, Helen and the developmental faculty have grown what is now recognized as one of the largest, strongest, and most coherent Developmental Science Programs in the country today. Professor Tager-Flusberg has mentored scores of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and she is well respected and valued for also mentoring junior faculty and her developmental science colleagues.

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences faculty are deeply impressed and extremely grateful for everything that Professor Tager-Flusberg has accomplished during her tenure at Boston University. We wish Helen all the best in her retirement, while recognizing that retirement means different things to different people. While Professor Tager-Flusberg has retired from teaching, she remains very research active, with eight active grants totaling over 16 million dollars in funding through 2028. Given the extent to which Helen remains research active, we expect we will continue to see Helen’s contributions to the field of autism for many decades to come.

Professor Tager-Flusberg provided the following personal reflection upon her retirement.

I retired from the University of Massachusetts (Boston; Medical School) on June 30th 2001 and on July 1st assumed my position as Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology at BU Medical School, an opportunity which I owe to then Dean Aram Chobainian and Professor Mark Moss, who was Chair of the Department. I spent eight rich and productive years on the medical campus but as the only faculty member focusing on developmental clinical research, I missed having colleagues whose work was more closely aligned with mine. When, in 2009, the opportunity came to move to the Department of Psychology (now PBS) to head up a new program in Developmental Science I grabbed it!

From the start, BU has been a welcoming home, one that has encouraged and supported my multidisciplinary research on autism. I loved the students I have had the good fortune to teach and mentor in my lab. And I have loved my colleagues – not only from my program and department but many others from across the University. Above all, I have most appreciated that BU encouraged me to collaborate across departments and colleges with colleagues to both teach and conduct research. I have learned so much over the past 23 years from so many people; these relationships will remain with me even after I eventually end my career here as Director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence. I cannot imagine a better institution to have made my home – BU is at the heart of everything that I have achieved over the last quarter century for which I will be ever grateful.

The following is Professor Tager-Flusberg’s original faculty profile.

Director: Center for Autism Research Excellence

Research Interests

The overall aims of the research conducted in our center address questions about the phenotypic characteristics of the language, communication, and associated social-cognitive deficits in autism (ASD) and other neurodevelopmental disorders. We have three ongoing lines of research:  1) investigating the early behavioral and brain developmental trajectories in infants at risk for autism (in collaboration with Children’s Hospital Boston; 2) comparing autism and specific language impairment in behavioral and fMRI studies of children and adolescents (in collaboration with MIT); 3) our Autism Center Excellence studies on minimally verbal children with autism (in collaboration with colleagues at BU, MGH, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Northeastern).