Dr. Carrie Allison is the Director of Research Strategy at Autism Research Centre. She contributes to ARC’s strategy and development and provides support to the Director, staff and students.
Dr. Allison has a degree in Psychology from Durham University and earned her PhD and post doctorate at ARC in collaboration with the Institute of Public Health. She is also the research manager at Autism Research Trust.
She conducted a study on school aged children using the Childhood Autism Screening Test (CAST) and a population screening study evaluating the Quantitative Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (Q-CHAT) for 18-30 month old toddlers. She developed “red flags” to make autism identification easier. She based it around the adult, adolescent and child versions of the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). The AQ10 is recommended in the NICE guidelines for Autism Adults: Diagnosis Management (CG142).
The guidelines on her AQ 10 were wrong and caused a lot of people not to be diagnosed. It took two GRADUATE students to catch this horrible error.This error potentially caused many people not to get supports that they needed.
Dr. Allison help run a study that says just by measuring autistic traits in under a half of 1 million people, the individual’s sex and whether they work in STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) profession can predict how many autistic traits a person can have. That is right out of Simon Baron-Cohen’s testosterone theory. Simon Baron-Cohen was in on this study as well. This theory is outdated and proven false.
On Baron-Cohen’s PCOS study, Dr. Allison co-supervised this study. She says,”most women with PCOS won’t have a child with autism, but we want to be transparent with this new information.” This study tells no one anything. PCOS is a common comorbidity with autistic people. This study was published in a Journal called Nature where a lot of quacks publish their bogus studies.
“We need to think about practical steps we can put in place to support women with PCOS as they go their pregnancies.” This was not about pregnant people with PCOS, this was about detecting autism before birth.
She is currently participating in Spectrum 10k and is responsible for the governance of Spectrum 10k and overseeing data collection.
Sources:
https://www.autismresearchtrust.org/pages/faqs/category/meet-the-researcher
Aviva Seigler 
2 thoughts on “Problematic Professionals: Carrie Allison”