Dinners With Interesting People 2/10/2026

Our featured guest, Julia Parish-Morris, is a scientist in the Center for Autism Research and a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical & Health Informatics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Her primary research interests are language development, social attention, and the interactive effects of language and social motivation on higher social cognition. Recent projects include assessing social motivation and language development using infrared eye tracking, studying growth trajectories of receptive and expressive language in preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), examining the moderating effects of language on intervention outcomes in 3- to 5-year-olds with ASD, and applying computational linguistics methods to pinpoint a "linguistic signature" of autism.