Hari Srinivasan
Disability as Possibility
Hari shares insights gathered through his personal experience of autism and discusses his research in the context of life outcomes for students and youth with disabilities. He challenges professionals, educators, and providers to be game changers – adopting a growth mindset, an emphatic discipline, and an approach of ‘equity of access’ to support and guide students and youth with disabilities to create their own personal agency and long-term quality of life. Through that understanding and ability to see ‘disability as possibility’, opportunities are born from those possibilities so students and youth can take detours, challenge the sinkholes, pave new roads, and persevere.
Hari is a recent graduate of University of California Berkeley with a BA Honors in Psychology and minor in Disability Studies. He was a University Medal finalist, awarded the Psychology Departmental Citation, Phi Beta Kappa and Psi Chi.
As a student journalist he has written over 50 articles for The Daily Californian many of them centered around autism and disability. For 7 semesters, he was also the lead student instructor for an impactful course on autism where the class enrollment grew from 17 to 50. He also had the opportunity to work at campus psychology research labs on issues like ADHD, mental health and sleep as well as head Team Propaganda at the UC Berkeley Disability Lab. He also served as the first nonspeaking president of the student body, Autism: Spectrum at Cal. As a Haas Scholar, during his senior year, he conducted a year-long mentored research drawing upon the knowledge in positive psychology, which he hopes will add to the coping toolbox for autistics.
This fall he heads to a Ph.D in neuroscience at Vanderbilt along with a prestigious PD Soros Fellowship.
Outside of academia, Hari’s advocacy work involves serving on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which advises federal policy and priorities. He is also vice-chair of the board of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, on the Council of Autistic Advisors for the Autism Society and on the Community Advisory Board for the Brain Foundation.
Hari is a minimally speaking autistic with significant oral-motor apraxia, fine motor challenges, body schema challenges, sensory dysregulation and other health issues all of which can contribute to high levels of anxiety.
He is also a Board member and Whistleblower Compliance Officer at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Council of Autistic Advisors for the Autism Society of America and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt. He also enjoys creative writing with some of his poems and other work winning awards including a National Gold Medal at Carnegie Hall.
