President's Message - August 2019.
This is a conference brag sheet, not science—no clinical takeaway.
01Research in Context
What this study did
This is a two-page conference note, not a research paper.
The author listed how many people came to INSAR 2019 and which reporters covered it.
No clients, no intervention, no data.
What they found
The meeting drew 2,200 delegates from 50 countries.
TV and newspaper stories reached millions of readers.
A new “Global Senior Leaders” group was launched to spread autism science wider.
How this fits with other research
Stagnone et al. (2025) look forward, not back. Their 2025 editorial says VR and metaverse tools are the next big thing for training clinicians. Anonymous (2019) simply cheers record attendance—no tech talk at all.
Amaral (2023) pushes the same inclusion theme. That 2023 editorial tells researchers to drop words like “normal controls” and use “non-autistic peers.” The 2019 note brags about wider global reach, but never mentions language choices.
Eussen et al. (2016) is the only neighbor with real data. They showed a short lecture plus an autistic speaker panel made medical students feel more ready to treat autistic patients. The 2019 summary has no follow-up on whether INSAR changed anyone’s practice.
Why it matters
If you want hard evidence, skip this page. Use it only as a time-stamp: autism science was already going global in 2019. Pair it with Eussen et al. (2016) to remind yourself that feeling “more confident” after a talk is nice, but we still need to check if doctors actually improve care.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →File this under “background noise” and open M et al. (2016) if you need real training data.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
INSAR 2019, held in Montreal, Canada on May 2nd -4th, was a thought-provoking success.The over 2,500 registrants from more than 50 countries were informed by over 1,900 presentations (poster, oral, panel and keynote).Also, for the first time INSAR supported the attendance of community constituents by offering a limited number of reduced rate registrations.The Society owes a debt of gratitude to Evdokia Anagnostou, Joseph Buxbaum, Emily Jones, Mayada Elsabbagh, Eve-Marie Quintin as well as Jennifer Gentry of INSAR and Joe Dymek of Conference Direct for all their efforts in making the Annual Meeting and Local Community Conference such a success.The attendance for INSAR 2019 was the highest on record.Indeed, the average conference registration for the last four years was 2,168 (Montreal, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Baltimore), which is 19% greater than the average attendance of the previous four years of 1,826 (Salt Lake City, Atlanta, San Sebastian, Spain, Toronto, Canada).This attests to the growth and health of the Society, but also means that the conference now requires larger conference venues to fulfill its goals.The INSAR Annual Meeting also attracts increasing amounts of media and social media coverage.The Communication Committee (Alison Singer, Chair) reported that research reports from the conference were picked up by US News and World Reports, Medical Health News, Health Day, CTV News and CBS Montreal, Nation Post, among others.Social media, as one might expect, provided even more active information distribution platforms.The Communication Committee tracked 9,600 tweets by 2,800 authors with hashtags #INSAR2019 or #AUTISMINSAR.Posts containing these hashtags then appeared on 58 million individuals' timelines over the four days of the meeting.Facebook Live streamed the May 2nd INSAR Press Conference which was viewed by 4,700 + individuals on the INSAR Facebook page and reached 31,031 individuals' timelines.So, what is said at INSAR doesn't just reverberate within the conference, it informs and matters to the community.The INSAR Institute webinar series just wrapped up at the end of July.All current INSAR members have access to the recordings as a benefit of membership.INSAR thanks the Student and Trainee Committee for organizing and hosting this webinar series for the fourth year.INSAR continued to expand its global outreach efforts in at least two ways.First, starting after INSAR 2023, the Society plans to hold conferences outside of North America on a more frequent three year cycle, rather than every five years.Second, INSAR is moving forward with a new Global Senior Leaders (GLS) initiative championed by Past-President Simon Baron-Cohen.Global Senior Leaders will serve as: i) a point person in their country to inform the Society about issues of national and international importance that related to autism research in their country, ii) serve as a role model for autism research excellence in their country, thus increasing INSAR membership recruitment in their country, and iii) foster a trans-national research culture that facilitates multi-center collaboration and team science approaches.The INSAR Board appointed Declan Murphy (UK) and Petrus de Vries (South Africa) to form a steering committee to advance the GLS initiative.In short order, Declan and Petrus developed a stellar steering committee by June of 2019 comprised of Gauri Divan (India), Naoufel Gaddour (Tunisia), Angelina Kakooza-Mwesige (Uganda), Alexia Rattazzi (Argentina), Cheryl Dissanayake (Australia) and Evdokia Anagnostou (Canada) as initial representatives of the South-East Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, African, South American, Australian, and North American Regions.Finally, the globalization of INSAR will be enhanced by this year's Regional INSAR Meeting scheduled for October 17th -19th in Puerto Varas, Chile.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2192