Dr Meera is a speech-language pathologist by clinical training. She is an assistant professor at the department of speech pathology and audiology at the national institute of mental health and neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, India. She is part of a multidisciplinary team that works with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disorders (DD). She recently returned to India after completing her 2-year post-doctoral training in neurosciences as a Fulbright-Nehru scholar in an NIH funded autism centre for excellence network study at UNC-Chapel Hill, USA.  Her work included, understanding how parent report of early signs (around the first birthday) can help in identifying infants at a higher likelihood for a later diagnosis of ASD, and identifying early language markers of ASD in infants at high familial likelihood for Autism. Dr. Meera is a recipient of the prestigious Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance early career fellowship in clinical and public health, 2019-2024. Funding from this fellowship has supported her to kick-start this lab – The Infant-Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab (LiL’) - https://ssm-lab.org/. She is an early career global representative (India and neighbouring countries) under the Global Representative Initiative Pilot (GRIP) - an initiative by the early career committee of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). She also serves as a member of the cultural diversity committee of INSAR. Her current areas of interest include screening methods for early detection of ASD and related DD, parent-mediated early intervention for children with autism and other DDs, language, and communication deficits in the broader autism phenotype, co-morbidity in ASD, and bilingual language development in children with DD.

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