UT Tyler Office of Marketing and Communications

Smith County Champions for Children and The University of Texas at Tyler Host Dr. Temple Grandin as Part of Autism Awareness Month

April 6, 2017

Media Contact:  Hannah Buchanan
Editor/Writer–Strategic Communications & Media Relations
Marketing and Communications
The University of Texas at Tyler
903.539.7196 (cell)

Editor's Note: This press release is presented on behalf of Smith County Champions for Children.

Smith County Champions for Children in cooperation with The University of Texas at Tyler will host Temple Grandin, PhD., for the first time in Tyler, at The University of Texas at Tyler Herrington Patriot Center on Friday, April 14. The event will include a meet and greet, book sale and signing from 8:30 – 9:30 a.m. Dr. Grandin will then speak on "Different Minds Contribute to Society" from 10 - 11 a.m. with a 30-minute Q&A to follow. At 1 – 2 p.m., Dr. Grandin will speak to youth and their parents who raise livestock.

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is the most accomplished and well-known adult with autism in the world. Her fascinating life, with its challenges and success, was brought to the screen with the HBO full-length film Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes. As an international speaker with autism, Dr. Grandin inspires and motivates others through her story. She did not talk until she was three-and-a-half years old, communicating her frustration instead by screaming, peeping, and humming. In 1950, she was diagnosed with autism and her parents were told she should be institutionalized. She recounts "groping her way from the far side of darkness" in her book Emergence: Labeled Autistic, which stunned the world at a time that an autism diagnosis was virtually though to be the end of achievement or productivity in life.

Dr. Grandin developed her talents into a successful career as a livestock-handling equipment designer, one of the few in the world. From her unique perspective she has now designed the facilities in which half the cattle are handled in the United States, consulting for such firms as Burger King, McDonald's, Swift and others. She currently works as a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and speaks around the world on both autism and cattle handling.

Dr. Grandin has been featured on many television programs and has been written about in national publications. Her best-selling books on autism include: The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's; Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships; Animals Make Us Human, Animals in Translation and Thinking in Pictures.

Registration for the morning event is $40 at www.championsforchildren.org. The afternoon session is free to youth who raise livestock and their parents.