Title: Assistant Professor, School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences; Faculty Supervisor, Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders, Southern Illinois University
Age: 38
Education: B.A., psychology, California State University, Sacramento; M.A., psychology, California State University, Sacramento; Ph.D., applied behavior analysis, Institute of Applied Behavioral Sciences, Endicott College; and postdoctoral fellow, Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Career mentors: Dr. Caio Miguel, California State University, Sacramento, and Dr. Michael F. Dorsey, applied behavior analyst
Words of wisdom/advice for new faculty members: “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”
Since arriving at Southern Illinois University (SIU) as a tenure-track faculty member in 2021, Dr. Lesley Shawler has developed programs and courses that have impressed her colleagues and community. One administrator, Dr. Tammy Kochel, described Shawler as “an innovator and a scholar” working both within the university and in the surrounding community to effect positive change.
“Soon after arriving on campus, she began to offer clinical training and administrative leadership to our campus’ Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders,” wrote Kochel, associate dean of research, diversity, and personnel, in nominating Shawler to become a 2023 Emerging Scholar. “She became the principal investigator on a service grant which funds the center.”
Kochel said Shawler’s efforts have led to improved financial management of the program. “As a result of her first year of work and ability to build a team of interdisciplinary colleagues, she was able to advocate for the center to receive an increase in funding from $185,100 to over $362,000,” said Kochel, noting that the funding has enabled the center “to provide much-needed free services for low-income families with children with autism. Lesley’s vision and actions have resulted in a top-tier program capable of service and research.”
Shawler said she knew in high school what her general area of research would be. “I knew that I wanted to do something with psychology when I went to college, but I wasn’t sure what that would look like, and I also decided at some point that I wanted to work with children,” she recalled. “I had learned about autism in textbooks in college, but to my knowledge I had never met a person with autism.”
That changed with an internship opportunity. In the second year of her master’s program at Cal State Sacramento, she was accepted into a summer internship in Massachusetts at the New England Center for Children. “I was able to do both practice and research, which was exciting for me, and I worked in a day program with adolescents a couple of days a week, and on the other days I did research.” She called it “definitely a unique experience that allowed me to meet well-known behavior analysts.”
