Workshop dates:
Workshop 1: September 14-15, 2026, over Zoom
Workshop 2: October 13-14, 2026, in person at the Simons Foundation · New York City
Workshop 3: February 8-9, 2027, in person at the Simons Foundation · New York City
Application Due June 15, 2026, 5pm ET
All fields marked with * are required and must be completed.
All applicants must hold a Ph.D., M.D., or equivalent degree and have a faculty position or the equivalent at a college, university, medical school, or other research facility. Individuals employed by for-profit companies are eligible to apply provided that their employer is able to adhere to all of the Foundation’s grant recipient policies, including open data sharing. Please refer to the Simons Foundation policies for more information.
Background & Motivation
Recent work in animal models has yielded exciting advances in unbiased approaches to capturing and analyzing behavior in rodents and other animal models. This work utilizes video capture, often of freely behaving animals, to enable fine-grained quantification and segmentation of nuanced motor and social behaviors. Such analyses frequently yield insight into behavioral variability between groups and among individuals, often through the identification of behavior not immediately salient to human observers. Further, these analyses often drive novel hypotheses that fuel studies of underlying neural dynamics and other biological mechanisms.
In humans with autism, behaviors are altered in many ways, many of which can be captured on video and audio recordings. Behaviors also vary greatly among autistic individuals, given autism’s complexity and considerable heterogeneity. As in animal models, it is possible that quantifiable autism-relevant behavior exists that has not yet been defined. Quantitative analysis of the visible and audible behaviors captured during video recording would advance our understanding of autism by enabling more nuanced parsing of heterogeneity, improving understanding of autism’s trajectory and outcomes across the lifespan, and fueling basic scientific discovery. Building on the current state-of-the-art in both human subjects and animal models, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) held an initial workshop in January 2026 to explore the potential for advancing quantitative work in this area, and concluded that the time is ripe to translate the advanced technologies and analytic pipelines developed for animal models and some human contexts to quantifying behavior in people with autism.
Workshops: Application & Goals
SFARI invites applications to participate in a series of three workshops (one remote and two in-person) aimed at developing a multi-year collaborative effort in quantitative behavioral phenotyping of humans with autism. These workshops will bring together autism researchers and experts in quantitative behavior analysis - in both animal models and humans - to plan how to develop and apply advanced technologies to better define and quantify motor and other visible phenotypes from video footage in humans with autism. We also plan to explore the analysis of associated audio data: individuals with autism often exhibit differences in speech, language, prosody, and conversational skills that make the audio stream rich for quantification.
This workshop series is the first step toward developing a funded collaborative effort. Discussions at the workshops will aim to: 1) clarify and align the scientific goals of the collaborative effort; 2) define existing data resources that could be utilized to achieve these goals, as well as gaps in existing data resources that might be addressed through small-scale data collection efforts; 3) identify analytic approaches and methods best suited to the chosen scientific goals, and needs for further development of associated tools; and 4) explore directions for larger scale data collection efforts, in alignment with phenotyping and scientific priorities.
We envision the first phase of a potential collaboration would be focused on the development and refinement of tools and methods for unbiased segmentation of human behavior, bringing together scientists working in diverse fields and model systems to tackle these goals. Targeted data collections in autism populations that advance tool development may also be performed. Longer term, we expect to launch larger scale data collection and analysis efforts aimed at advancing quantitative analysis of autism phenotypes. While the primary goal of a funded collaboration would be the analysis of visible behaviors from video footage, we also intend to support researchers working with accompanying audio data. We expect that discoveries emerging from this collaboration will not only improve our understanding and ability to describe the autism phenotype, but also enable investigation of neural mechanisms and facilitate cross-species work.
The first workshop will be held over Zoom on September 14-15, 2026. The second workshop will be held in person on October 13-14, 2026, at the Simons Foundation in NYC. The third and final workshop will be held in person on February 8-9, 2027. For out-of-town attendees, the foundation will cover the cost of your travel and hotel accommodation. If you are a US Visa holder or a potential international meeting attendee, we encourage you to make early preparations to ensure you will be able to attend the in-person meetings in New York. SFARI will provide honoraria to participants to support continued engagement between meetings.
Around 30 individuals will be selected for workshop participation. Applicants selected to participate in the first and second workshops will be notified by August 7, 2026. The final participant list for the third workshop will be determined after the second workshop.
Participation in these workshops is not a guarantee of inclusion in a collaborative effort or of future funding.
To apply, please submit your biosketch and a one-page statement describing your scientific expertise, how it connects to the scientific vision outlined above, and what unique perspectives or contributions you will bring to the discussions. Applicants may include in-text citations. A full bibliography is not required.
For questions or issues with this application, please contact: quantpheno@simonsfoundation.org