Dr. Temple Grandin with John Donvan

Program Date: April 27, 2019

Dr. Temple Grandin is something of a rock star in the autism community. People with autism and their families know her story, they’ve read her books, and they look up to the woman who simultaneously led a groundbreaking career in animal science and gave the world its first look at life from inside the autistic mind. At The Richmond Forum, she shared with 4,500 Richmonders her visual way of thinking, her successes and challenges, and painted a vivid picture of life with autism.

Temple Grandin’s first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, gave a personal narrative of the disorder, which was previously considered to be a death sentence to a person’s productivity. Grandin’s account proved otherwise.

Public perceptions and awareness of autism have shifted since that book’s release in 1986, as John Donvan, the evening’s moderator, showed through a mini-experiment when the two sat down to begin the evening.

Mary Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is the most accomplished and well-known adult with autism in the world. Dr. Grandin is a prominent author and speaker on autism and animal behavior, a consultant on livestock handling and animal welfare, and a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin didn’t talk until she was three-and-a-half years old, communicating instead by screaming, peeping, and humming. In 1950, she was diagnosed with autism and her parents were told she should be institutionalized. Even though she was bullied for being “weird” in her young school years, she eventually found a mentor in her science teacher, who recognized her interests—horses, electronics, and model rockets—and her abilities, and encouraged her passion for science.

Grandin developed those interests into a successful career engineering livestock-handling equipment. Today, half of the cattle in the U.S. and Canada are handled in facilities she designed. She has also developed animal welfare guidelines for the meat industry.

Her 1986 book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, stunned the world because until its publication most professionals and parents assumed that an autism diagnosis was a death sentence for a person’s achievement or productivity. In the foreword of Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that her first book was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.”

Her other bestselling books include The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, Animals Make Us Human, and Animals in Translation. Her most recent book, Calling All Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor, shows young readers how to think like her by sharing many of the projects Grandin worked on as a child.

Dr. Grandin has been featured in national radio, television, and print media, including on the TIME 100 list of the most influential people. Her life story, with its many challenges and successes, was brought to the screen in HBO’s Emmy Award-winning movie Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes, and in the award-winning children’s book The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: The Story of Temple Grandin.

She is an inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and a past board member of the Autism Society of America.

Dr. Grandin holds a Bachelor’s degree in human psychology from Franklin Pierce College, a Master’s degree in animal science from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Grandin lives and farms in Fort Collins, Colorado.

John Donvan is a four-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, storyteller, author, and speaker.

A veteran network correspondent for ABC News and CNN, Donvan served as Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News and held long-term assignments in Moscow, London, Jerusalem, and Amman. He is a contributor for NPR, hosts and moderates the Intelligence Squared U.S. debate series, and has moderated several Richmond Forum programs.

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book In A Different Key: The Story of Autism (2016, co-authored with Caren Zucker) on the history of autism and autism advocacy. In a Different Key is the basis for an upcoming documentary film of the same name to be produced by its authors. On the film’s crowdsourcing page, Donvan and Zucker introduce it as “the first-ever full-length documentary to travel the timeline of society’s tense and sometimes misguided response to people on the autism spectrum.”

Donvan holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College and a Master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism. Donvan is married to Dr. Ranit Mishori, and lives in Washington, D.C. They have two children.