Neurodivergent adults, such as those on the autism spectrum, or with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, or other cognitive differences, experience significant barriers to inclusion in education and employment due to disabilities that often aren鈥檛 obvious. Research shows聽that remain consistently employed over time, and just are employed, compared to 87% employment among adults without ADHD. Studies suggest that is neurodivergent. Accordingly, efforts to improve the neuroinclusivity of academic institutions and workplaces have significant potential for impact on individuals, families and the U.S. economy.

鈥淭he lower education and employment outcomes are largely attributed to education and workplace environments that were designed to reinforce normative expectations,鈥� said , 91探花associate professor in the Information School and founding director of the Institute. 鈥淲hen learning and work environments are designed for neurodiversity 鈥� and managers and teachers are trained to be neuroinclusive 鈥� neurodivergent individuals achieve far better outcomes.鈥�

Annabi is a leading scholar on neurodiversity and employment. Her work in this space includes the publication of a series of Neurodiversity @ Work Playbooks that make a case for hiring neurodivergent people and offer concrete instructions for supporting their growth and career development.

鈥淭he Institute for Neurodiversity and Employment is set up to make a significant difference 鈥� not just at the 91探花, but for communities all over our state,鈥� said , executive director of the Canopy Neurodiversity Foundation. 鈥淭his institute will build on Canopy鈥檚 vision for a truly neuroinclusive workforce, dramatically expanding what鈥檚 possible in our state.鈥�

Housed in the Information School, the Institute will integrate faculty, research and support from the and the , with additional collaboration from 91探花Medicine and the School of Social Work.

鈥淭he new institute will build upon the outstanding neurodiversity work of Dr. Annabi at the Information School,鈥� said , dean of the 91探花Information School. 鈥淎dding the deep expertise of our cross-campus collaborators, along with Canopy and other community partners, we will create truly multidisciplinary, innovative and impactful solutions that will transform Washington鈥檚 education and employment spaces 鈥� including here at the UW.鈥�

鈥淎t present, research addressing lifespan issues such as employment is happening in silos across various disciplines, limiting our ability to develop comprehensive solutions,鈥� said Annabi. 鈥淏y convening a broad coalition of partners across the neurodiversity, employment and academic communities, we can move beyond isolated efforts toward innovative, systems-level change 鈥� driven by those with lived experience and deep expertise.鈥�

The Institute鈥檚 work will focus on five pillars: translational research on neurodiversity and employment, applied professional education and training, community empowerment across Washington state, advocacy efforts to create and strengthen neuroinclusive policies and practices statewide, and direct engagement with 91探花leadership to make the university a premier destination for neurodivergent faculty, staff, clinicians and students.

Annabi is particularly enthusiastic about the UW鈥檚 commitment to 鈥榳alk the talk鈥� by committing, through the Institute, to neuroinclusive employment practices.

“The 91探花recognizes that employment is an important component of a person鈥檚 quality of life and the equitable distribution of societal resources and power,鈥� said 91探花Provost Tricia Serio.聽 “As one of the state鈥檚 largest employers, we have a vital role to play in modeling ways to increase support for neurodivergent people and break down the persistence of barriers in post-secondary education and the workplace that they face. We are thrilled to channel this work through the Institute for Neurodiversity and Employment.鈥�

The 91探花Institute for Neurodiversity and Employment will launch activities and programming in 2026.

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For questions, please contact: neurodiversity@uw.edu.

In early March 2020, the 91探花 became the first four-year U.S. university to transition to online-only classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

severe consequences of these physical distancing measures. To understand how this change affected college students’ mental health, 91探花researchers surveyed 147 91探花students over the 2020 spring quarter, which began shortly after the university transitioned to online-only classes. The team compared the students’ responses to a previous survey of 253 students in spring quarter 2019.

The researchers didn’t see much change in average levels of students’ depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress or loneliness between 2019 and 2020 or between the beginning and the end of spring quarter 2020. But these average values were masking large differences in students’ individual pandemic experiences. In general, students who used more problem-focused forms of coping 鈥� creating plans, focusing on positive aspects, etc. 鈥� experienced fewer mental health symptoms than those who disengaged or ignored a situation that was bothering them.

The researchers June 28 in PLOS ONE.

“During the pandemic, the challenges of online learning were entwined with social isolation, family demands and socioeconomic pressures,” said lead author , an affiliate associate professor in the 91探花Information School. “There鈥檚 not a simple answer to the question of how students were affected: Some experienced intense distress while others were unscathed.”

For the past four years, this team has spent spring quarter studying what factors contribute to undergraduates’ overall mental health and well-being. Students are invited to continue participating in each spring quarter study, and the researchers also recruit new students each time. In a previous paper, the researchers found that experiencing discrimination events altered student behavior, such as the amount of sleep or exercise a student got following the event.

For the 2020 cohort, the team used three different survey methods to monitor student health. First, they sent large surveys at the beginning and end of spring quarter. Then participants received two shorter surveys each week that asked them to reflect on how they felt 鈥� in terms of stress, loneliness, depressive symptoms 鈥� in the moment.

In general, students who reported more mental health symptoms at the beginning of the pandemic continued to experience elevated symptoms during the pandemic.

鈥淧roblem-focused coping protected students from the harmful effects of stress (anxiety and depression, for example), even though students who used more problem-focused strategies reported more stress,” said co-author , a 91探花doctoral student in clinical psychology.

“What these findings suggest is that students who coped by actively confronting their challenges, rather than avoiding them, still experienced highly stressful events over the course of the pandemic. However, they were protected from the mental health consequences,” Kuehn said. “It may not always feel pleasant or easy to confront the challenges of daily life, particularly during a pandemic, but doing so is likely to be highly beneficial in terms of reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms.”

Finally, at the end of spring quarter, the team conducted 90-minute in-depth interviews over Zoom with a subset of participants to gain deeper insight into their experiences.

The students described a range of challenges that interfered with learning:

• Decreased interaction with faculty and peers 鈥� students mentioned that having fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and peers left them feeling less engaged. Some students said they felt like part-time students, even when they had full course loads
• No shared learning environments 鈥� students spoke longingly of a table in a dorm or a spot in the library where they used to gather with classmates for impromptu study sessions
• Family needs 鈥� family members’ requests or noise often interrupted studying and even test-taking. Family needs, such as caregiving, were a particular challenge to learning for first-generation college students
• Interrupted autonomy 鈥� some students felt “trapped” back at home and described difficult “power dynamics” with their parents
• Well-being and mental health 鈥� many students described disrupted sleep, decreased motivation, and said that they felt depressed or anxious for periods of time. Students’ feelings of detachment from school sometimes contributed to depression. Similarly, worry about grades sometimes cascaded into anxiety and insomnia that, in turn, made it harder to focus

Students also developed strategies to combat these challenges, including:

• Self-learning 鈥� students used independent online research to figure out answers to their questions and made up their own experiments to explore what they were learning in class
• Structuring routines and environments 鈥� many students created fixed schedules for studying or used physical calendars to mark timelines and assignments
• Learning with peers 鈥� students created remote study groups and held informal remote co-working sessions that combined homework with personal conversations, which helped keep them on task
• Participating more in online spaces 鈥� many students found it less daunting to ask questions in online classes than in large lecture halls, others found it easier to participate in online office hours and meetings with advisers
• Using communication platforms for emotional wellbeing 鈥� some students used telehealth or meditation apps, but almost all of them used video communication to check in with their friends. Students emphasized that these connections were critical for their mental health

“On an optimistic note, students are emerging with critical skills for learning and maintaining connectedness with peers over a distance,” Morris said. “These active coping skills, which include things such as initiating virtual co-working sessions, leveraging online functions to participate in class and checking in on friends in an emotionally sensitive way, will have continued value as we resume in-person and hybrid models of education.”

The team plans to follow students through all four years of their time at the UW. The first study cohort graduated this year, and the second cohort will graduate in spring 2022.

Additional co-authors are Jennifer Brown, an alumnus of the 91探花school of public health who is the research coordinator for this project; , a professor in the 91探花School of Social Work; and , 91探花doctoral students in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; , a doctoral student in the Information School; , a 91探花professor of electrical and computer engineering; , professor and dean of the 91探花Information School; , a researcher at Google; and , a professor in the Allen School. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Google, the Allen School, 91探花Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the 91探花College of Engineering and the 91探花Population Health Initiative.

For more information, contact Morris at margiemm@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: EDA-2009977, CHS-2016365, CHS-1941537, F31MH117827

Discrimination 鈥� differential treatment based on an aspect of someone’s identity, such as nationality, race, sexual orientation or gender 鈥� is linked to lower success in careers and poorer health. But there is little information about how individual discrimination events affect people in the short term and then lead to these longer-term disparities.

91探花 researchers aimed to understand both the prevalence of discrimination events and how these events affect college students in their daily lives.

Over the course of two academic quarters, the team compared students’ self-reports of unfair treatment to passively tracked changes in daily activities, such as hours slept, steps taken or time spent on the phone. On average, students who encountered unfair treatment were more physically active, interacted with their phones more and spent less time in bed on the day of the event. The team will Nov. 12 at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Austin, Texas.

“We looked at objective measures of behavior to try to really understand how this experience changed students鈥� daily life,” said lead author, a doctoral student in the 91探花Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “The ultimate goal is to use this information to develop changes that we can make both in terms of the educational structure and individual support systems for students to help them succeed both during and after their time in college.”

The project started out as a way to monitor students’ mental health during college.

“I was struck by how many students suffered from mental health issues and depression, due in part to the increased stress of college and being away from home,” said co-author, professor and dean of the 91探花Information School. “Our approach in this paper, using passive sensing and data modeling, really lends itself to studying frequent events. Unfair treatment, or discrimination, might happen repeatedly in a quarter.”

The team recruited 209 first-year 91探花students from across campus for a study over the 2018 winter and spring academic quarters. Of the 176 students who completed the study, 41% were in the College of Engineering while the rest were spread between various academic colleges, 65% identified as women and 29% identified as first-generation college students.

Participants wore Fitbit Flex 2 devices to track daily activities like time asleep and physical activity. The students also had to track location, activity, screen unlocking events and phone call length.

The team sent the students a series of surveys throughout the six-month study, including short “check-in” surveys at least twice a week. During the weeks before midterm and final exams, the students got a variation of this survey four times every day. Among the survey questions: Had the student, in the past 24 hours, been unfairly treated because of “ancestry or national origin, gender, sexual orientation, intelligence, major, learning disability, education or income level, age, religion, physical disability, height, weight or other aspect of one鈥檚 physical appearance?”

“We had a very large table comparing everything, such as the number of steps that you’ve had for each day,” Sefidgar said. “We also marked the days for the reports when they exist. Then it’s a matter of determining for each individual whether there are changes for days with discrimination events compared to days with no events.”

Overall, the researchers collected around 450 discrimination events and about one terabyte of data. The team analyzed people’s actions on days when they were and weren’t experiencing discrimination. On average, when students reported an unfair event they walked 500 more steps, had one more phone call in the evening, interacted five more times with their phones in the morning and spent about 15 fewer minutes in bed compared to days when they didn’t experience discrimination.

“It’s so hard to summarize the impact of something like this in a few statistics,” said senior author, a professor in the Allen School. “Some people move more, sleep more or talk on the phone more, while some people do less. Maybe one student is reacting by playing games all day and another student put down their phone and went to hang out with a friend. It’s giving us a lot of questions to follow up on.”

has been a professor with the 91探花 Information School since he was recruited in 1998 by former dean Mike Eisenberg. Bruce was named dean in 2005 and reappointed to the position in 2012. As he looks forward to stepping down from the deanship in September, he answered a few questions about his work and the “iSchool.”

As you end your tenure as dean of the 91探花Information School, of what achievements are you most proud?

I feel proud that I have played some role in leading and modeling values for a school that is welcoming to all and celebrates diversity 鈥� where all members of the community feel joy, belonging and deep satisfaction as they work and learn together.

There is a wonderful sense of shared purpose and commitment underpinning the growth, success and impact of the iSchool. Our faculty, staff, students and external supporters feel a strong bond with one another because they are certain about the importance of our work together and its capacity to produce positive change in the lives of people. I am extremely proud of what we have achieved together.

, of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, has been chosen as the next permanent iSchool dean. What strengths do you think he will bring to that challenging role?

I am very excited about the appointment of Professor Dey as the next dean of the 91探花iSchool. A number of my colleagues who are long-serving deans of iSchools around the world have commented to me that it is a testament to the quality of the 91探花iSchool that the deanship would attract a candidate with Professor Dey鈥檚 credentials.

He currently leads Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Institute. HCI is one of several signatures of excellence in the 91探花iSchool. The 91探花is world-renowned in this field because we have faculty and student researchers from numerous schools, departments and colleges working together as the Design Use Build (DUB) group. The HCI world sat up and took notice when it was announced that Professor Dey was appointed dean of the 91探花iSchool, and would be joining the 91探花HCI team.

Professor Dey has experience in leading a multidisciplinary faculty and he will bring this background to his deanship of the iSchool. One of the iSchool鈥檚 core values is that we are a “School of One.” This relates in part to the shared sense of purpose and commitment that I spoke of earlier in this interview. Beyond that, it refers to the quality of the interactions occurring between iSchool researchers and instructors who confront scientific and professional problems from a broad range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Our faculty are drawn to work more deeply on their research because they do so in partnership with their colleagues who challenge them to develop solutions from alternative ways of thinking and knowing. Professor Dey is well-equipped to lead such a community and to facilitate and support its capacity for important and high impact work.

The 91探花is seen as among the world leaders in the information school movement, which dates back to the exponential growth of information in the 1980s. You were among the leaders in this movement through a caucus of deans nationwide. What is the movement and what has its effect been on higher education?

The iSchool movement began in the United States when a number of schools that were offering degrees in the library and information sciences realized that their teaching and research programs had capacity to reach a broader audience of students and to prepare professionals for work beyond libraries.

The term “information professional” was being used to describe people who were working in settings that were emerging from the growing information, technology and knowledge economy. The need for research related to the increasing role that information was playing in the lives of people, communities and institutions was also apparent.

The original schools in the information school (iSchool) movement predicted an increasing need for schools that could respond to these research needs and to changes in society and the workplace. They began hiring additional faculty with relevant expertise and developing new academic and research programs. The 91探花was at the forefront of this phenomenon.

Indeed, the need for a school of this type was outlined by a 91探花Futures Committee in 1997 and what resulted (the 91探花iSchool) can be described as a great strategic success for our campus. We developed the brand iSchool here at the 91探花and the term “iSchool” is now used to describe schools and colleges like ours on campuses around the world.

From a small group of schools in the U.S. this movement now includes over 80 schools from all parts of the world. In all regions of the world, researchers in iSchools are focusing their attention on enhancing the lives of people, the productivity of companies, the innovation cycles of industries, the design of technologies, the policies that govern technology and information use, information services to communities, and much more. I am extremely grateful that I have been blessed to play a leadership role in this movement and that the 91探花iSchool has become a role model for other iSchools around the world.

A recent iSchool tweet showed you entertaining children at a summer reading camp. You look pretty comfortable with a guitar 鈥� what might you have done had you not become an academic?

I would have loved a career with music 鈥� performance, composition, or production. Music has been an avocation for me all my life. I am deeply moved by music and I am inspired by musicians. I love sharing music with my family and friends. I will continue pursuing my passion for music for the rest of my life.

• Learn more about the 91探花Information School at its .