People & Ideas

This section maps the people, organisations, and intellectual currents that have shaped how we understand neurodiversity and sensory processing.

Key figures

Foundational researchers

Winnie Dunn — the four-type sensory processing framework that underpins most of the practical work in this wiki. A. Jean Ayres — founded the field of sensory integration. Grace Baranek — developed the SEQ and pioneered early sensory identification.

Historical figures

Leo Kanner — first clinical description of autism (1943). Hans Asperger — parallel description, complicated legacy including Nazi-era complicity. Lorna Wing — introduced the autism spectrum concept and brought Asperger’s work to the English-speaking world. Uta Frith — weak central coherence theory, translated Asperger’s 1944 paper. Alan Leslie — metarepresentation and Theory of Mind Module.

Contemporary voices

Damian Milton — the Double Empathy Problem. Robert Chapman — gave neurodiversity philosophical architecture. Simon Baron-Cohen — Theory of Mind, empathising-systemising, contested but influential. Nancy Doyle — neurodiversity in the workplace. Temple Grandin — the first public autistic voice. Fern Brady — lived-experience testimony, late diagnosis. Steve Silberman — NeuroTribes, made neurodiversity legible to a general audience.

Theorists

Dinah Murray — monotropism theory, explaining autistic attention as concentrated on fewer channels rather than distributed broadly. A single framework accounting for intense interests, social differences, and sensory patterns.

Clinical innovators

Kelly Mahler — the interoception curriculum. Barry Prizant — SCERTS model, Uniquely Human. Andrew McDonnell — low-arousal approaches. Magda Mostafa — ASPECTSS design framework.

Contested figures

Stephen Porges — polyvagal theory, scientifically disputed. Lucy Jane Miller — SPD diagnosis advocacy, important but complicated.

Movement founders

Judy Singer — coined “neurodiversity.” Jim Sinclair — “Don’t Mourn for Us,” founding autistic self-advocacy.

The SGL researchers

Jeanet Landsman-Dijkstra, Andrea Fokkens, Marieke Werkman — the UMCG team whose participatory research produced the knowledge foundations this wiki is built on.

Organisations

UMCG TGO — the academic birthplace of the SGL project. NVA — the Dutch Autism Association. LFB — self-advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities. Academische Werkplaats Autisme — bridging research and practice in the Netherlands. PARC — the UK’s first autistic-led research network.

Projects

De Sensatie van een Goed Leven — the four-year participatory research project that produced sensonate.nl and the frameworks (prikkelbalans, prikkeltaal, prikkelprofiel) documented in this wiki.

Stichting Bruggenmakers — the Dutch charity hosting the Sensonate programme.