Jamie Pearson
About
Dr. Jamie Pearson, a former behavioral interventionist and autism program consultant, is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences at North Carolina State University. Dr. Pearson earned her PhD in Special Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she developed FACES (Fostering Advocacy, Communication, Empowerment, and Support), a parent advocacy program designed to support Black families raising autistic youth. Dr. Pearson’s research focuses on: (a) disparities in autism identification, service access, and service utilization, (b) the impact of parent-advocacy and empowerment training on child and family outcomes, and (c) strategies to promote positive parent-professional partnerships between educators and historically marginalized communities.
Dr. Pearson’s FACES program is funded by a 2021 Early Career Development and Mentoring Grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (R324B210003). She is also a Co-Principal Investigator on a project designed to promote STEM career development in high school students with autism, funded by the National Science Foundation. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals in the fields of special education and racial and ethnic disparities, and she has written several invited and refereed book chapters on autism, families, and racial and ethnic disparities in special education.