NDBIs + AAC · Jobs
Visual Play Implementation Lead, Embedded at a UCLA Autism Lab
Six Months, Full Time
You've been around the block a few times, but you still wake up many mornings thinking about play: the brain asking to be expanded, the window that opens early and closes maybe never.
You know play is complicated. Not just following the child anywhere, but taking them through the developmental stages they need, modeling language along the way, and expecting something back. For you, there was never a tension between developmental and behavioral standpoints. They inform each other. There needs to be effective teaching.
You're mildly disappointed in technology, in the way disappointed idealists often are. You've seen AAC help. You're also clear-eyed about where it falls short. You wish apps were less of an edict and more of a conversation.
And you see the gaps: play that isn't quite working, tech that doesn't quite fit.
What if you had six months, a full-time iOS developer at your side, and a mission: to change what counts as standard practice for early autism intervention in Los Angeles, listening, building, and spreading the word all at once?
You'd be embedded in UCLA's Kasari Lab, one of the top autism research groups in the world and experts in play. You'd be backed by SKIES, a small Pasadena company that makes one of the most-used communication apps for early communicators. The project, Visual Play, an app that puts pieces of play-based intervention in a clinician's hands, is funded by an NIH SBIR award; this is a six-month Phase I, and if it works, Phase II follows.
Practically, you'd spend your weeks out in the field and back at the lab: reaching out to clinicians and listening to what they need, running information sessions and demonstrations, training therapists on the technology, and bringing what you learn back to shape what gets built.
An ideal candidate
- has years of hands-on autism intervention experience with early communicators, including AAC, and is open and curious about how others do this work;
- knows clinicians across Los Angeles, and is known by them;
- wants to push the bounds of play-based intervention and the technology that supports it;
- is based in Los Angeles and can work in person at UCLA.