Alumni Reflections


Jennifer Sarrett (14G, ILA) became interested in autism in high school and taught her first autistic student in college.

Sarrett went on to pursue an M.Ed. in Special Education with a focus on Early Childhood and Autism from Vanderbilt. During that program, she traveled to Portugal to take a class on early intervention. “I was lucky enough to get one of two spots on a field trip to observe an early intervention session in a Romani camp. This was when I first realized that the culture a person comes from will impact the ways you treat and work with autistic children.”

Like so many students in the Laney Graduate School, this realization — and the curiosity it inspired — led Sarrett to the decision to pursue a PhD to research how culture influences autism. In her search for graduate programs, Sarrett discovered that the interdisciplinary focus of graduate education in the Laney Graduate School — and its Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts — would ultimately be the best fit for the kind of comparative research she wanted to do.

Jennifer Sarrett hugs a dog

“My dissertation compared parental and professional experiences of autism in Atlanta, GA and Kerala, India. I focused on the places of autism, which I identified as the home, the school, and the clinic. I looked at issues such as the diagnostic journey, explanatory models of autism, school policies that lead to stigma, and the ways physical and temporal structures impact these, and other, features of autism.”

The Laney Advantage

Today, Sarrett is a lecturer at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health. When reflecting about Laney programming, Sarrett credits the LGS teaching program (TATTO) and ethics program (Jones Program for Ethics) for their continued value to her work.

“I valued my experiences with TATTO and JPE as opportunities that helped me clarify my thoughts on my research experience and ethics, which is now a major research interest of mine. These sessions provide opportunities to graduate students that aren’t found in many programs. Having the opportunity to talk about, and thus think about, how to be a better teacher and researcher and how to critically evaluate the ethical issues that come up with both have influenced my current work on international research ethics with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”