Dr. Christina Nicolaidis, MD, MPH

Dr. Christina Nicolaidis, MD, MPH is an internal medicine physician, Professor of Social Work at Portland State University (PSU), and Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Academic Autism Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education (AASPIRE; www.aaspire.org), a long-standing partnership that uses community-based participatory research (CBPR) to address the priorities of autistic adults. She was the principal investigator (PI) on a series of NIH-funded studies to develop and test the AASPIRE Healthcare Toolkit (www.autismandhealth.org) and is currently the PI on a large NIH-funded project to develop and test patient-reported outcome measures for evaluating the effectiveness of services for autistic adults. Other AASPIRE projects focus on pregnancy, employment, suicide prevention, and autistic burnout. She also is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Autism in Adulthood (www.liebertpub.com/aut). More broadly, Dr. Nicolaidis directs the Social Determinants of Health Initiative (www.pdx.edu/social-determinants-health), teaches research methods at PSU, practices internal medicine at OHSU, and mentors dozens of junior faculty members and trainees across the world.