James Lee

I am an assistant professor in the Early Childhood Program within the Department of Special Education at The University of Texas at Austin. My research focuses on capacity building of marginalized families of young autistic children by leveraging implementation science, cultural adaptation and intervention development. Prior to coming to UT Austin, I was an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science of the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Seattle Children's Autism Center.

I have several lines of active research, including: (a) developing and testing an implementation toolkit to enhance evidence-based practice delivery among marginalized families of young autistic children (funded by NCATS), (b) identifying determinants and corresponding implementation strategies to enhance Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions use among clinicians serving young autistic children using community-based participatory research (funded by TexCEP), (c) using a modular approach to provide preemptive interventions among caregivers who are on the waitlist for their child's autism diagnosis (funded by THECB), (d) exploring support needs of diverse families with minimally verbal autistic children, (e) developing and validating wearable devices to measure parental stress, and (f) culturally adapting and piloting World Health Organization-Caregiver Skills Training program in low- and middle-income countries (funded by UW GIF). My research has been funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (KL2), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIH-LRP), Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (Minority Health Research), Texas Center for Equity Promotion (seed grant), Organization for Autism Research, and the University of Washington Office of Global Affairs.

I received my Ph.D. in Special Education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2021), followed by an IES-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project of the University of Kansas (2022). I also completed a master's degree in Global Health during my time at the University of Washington (2024).