Sitting in his sunny office at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), casually dressed in a plaid shirt and khakis, Fred Volkmar gives the impression that he has all the time in the world—though that is far from the truth.
His shih tzu, Charlie, visiting for the day, reposes in a nearby armchair exuding a similar spirit. Charlie’s fuzzy white muzzle is a near match to Volkmar’s wavy hair and bushy mustache.
In October, Volkmar retired after 44 years at Yale University’s Child Study Center, including 10 as director of the Autism Program, and moved from active faculty as Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology to emeritus status. But he holds an endowed chair in special education at SCSU—the school’s only named chair, in fact—from whence he continues to direct a wide array of activities.
In addition to several writing and editing projects, he oversees a program that gives local autistic high school students a taste of college at SCSU, and he continues to teach his popular undergraduate course on autism at Yale—reputedly the first course of its kind when Volkmar introduced it in 1984. And together with one of his recent undergraduate students, he published findings in March on a model program to help young autistic adults interact with police during traffic stops—a nontrivial issue, he notes, because “driving is key to employment.”
Volkmar has long been a towering figure in the field: an influential and observant clinician, a mentor to generations of autism researchers and a strong advocate for people on the spectrum and their families. “There aren’t that many places where the researchers are actively involved in the clinic,” says Catherine Lord, George Tarjan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked alongside Volkmar on many projects, committees and publications for decades, “and Fred was.”
Volkmar has authored hundreds of research papers and dozens of books on autism—including several for laypeople. Since 1987, he has edited every edition of the Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders, the fifth edition of which he is busy editing. And he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders from 2007 to 2022.
Perhaps most famously, Volkmar led the committee of the American Psychiatric Association that modernized the definitions and diagnostic criteria for autism in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published in 1994—though in 2012 he made waves with his public critique of the fifth edition’s approach to autism and his decision to leave the DSM-5 work group.
For Volkmar, a foundational principle is pragmatism—a steadfast focus on strategies that he believes will be helpful to autistic people in their daily lives. That value underpinned some of his objections to the DSM-5, and it remains central to his thinking today.
“Fred was always ‘big picture’ and very practical,” says Giacomo Vivante, associate professor at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, who trained under Volkmar at Yale.
“For any idea, he would ask: How is this going to be beneficial for the lives of autistic people or their parents? There was no attempt to encourage scholarship for the sake of scholarship.”