Ralph Sperry
Dr. Sperry is a Board Certified Clinical Psychologist. He currently is the Chief of Clinical Services at the Boston Higashi International School for Autism. Previously he was Chief Operating Officer of the May Institute and the National Autism Center. He serves as an autism expert on the International Speakers Bureau of the US State Department and is a reviewer for the research for National Clearinghouse for Evidence Based Practices at the University of North Carolina. In recent years he has worked with the governments of China, Oman, United Arab Emirates and Qatar to develop autism services. He has a strong interest in globally promoting evidence based autism practices.

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Tracy Vail
Tracy Vail is the co-owner of Let’s Talk Speech and Language Services, Inc. She obtained her BS in Psychology and Speech/Theatre from Frostburg State College and MS in Speech/Language Pathology from West Virginia University. She also obtained 56 doctoral credits in the areas of Early Intervention and Learning Disabilities from the same institution. She has post graduate training in the use of the DIR model (Floortime), TEACCH, Verbal Behavior, ABA, PECS, PROMPT and RDI. Tracy has been working with children on the Autism Spectrum since 1982 in a variety of settings including public schools, private schools and private practice. She served as the President of the North Carolina Speech-Hearing-Language Association and was on the Board of Directors that started The Mariposa School for Children with Autism. She also wrote the initial training manual for instructors and parents of the school. Tracy is a certified Crisis Prevention Intervention Instructor and a certified PCM Safety Care Instructor. In addition to her clinical work with children, she travels around the country and world-wide providing training and consultations for parents, teachers, organizations and school systems to increase their effectiveness in treating children with Autism.

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Vinod Menon
Vinod Menon is the Rachel L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and, Professor, by courtesy, of Neurology at Stanford University. He serves as director of Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. His lab is dedicated to the investigation of human brain function and dysfunction using a multidisciplinary approach that emphasizes a tight integration of cognitive, behavioral, neuroscience and computational methodologies. Prof. Menon received his BS (Honors) in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology and his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin. He did a postdoctoral fellowship in neurophysiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He came to Stanford University as a Sinclair Foundation Research Fellow and joined the faculty in 2000. Leveraging expertise in neuroscience, statistics, engineering, computer science, psychology, psychiatry, and neurology, Dr. Menon and his team were among the first to discover that the human brain is organized into specialized and interacting networks of brain regions, which has resulted in a paradigm shift in how we investigate human brain function and cognition. Virtually every psychiatric and neurological disorder has been probed with the scientific framework Dr. Menon and his team first developed. This included the discovery of the default mode and salience networks in the brain, which have led to elucidation of how deficits in access, engagement and disengagement of large-scale brain networks play a prominent role in psychopathology, providing novel insights into brain mechanisms underlying cognitive, affective, and social function and dysfunction that cut across multiple neurological and psychiatric disorders.

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