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 EBP delivery among marginalized families of young autistic children, (b) identifying determinants and corresponding implementation strategies to enhance NDBI use among clinicians serving young autistic children using CBPR, (c) using a modular approach to provide preemptive interventions among caregivers who are in waitlist for their child's autism diagnosis, (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 WHO-Caregiver Skills Training program in LMICs. My research has been funded from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (KL2), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIH-LRP), Organization for Autism Research, University of Washington Office of Global Affairs.

I received my PhD 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 of Public Health (MPH) degree in Global Health during my time at the University of Washington (2024).