Barry has more than 50 years experience as a clinical scholar, consultant, researcher and program consultant to children and older persons on the autism spectrum and related neurodevelopmental conditions and their families. He is a Speech-Language Pathologist and holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC-SLP) of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Barry has served as a tenured Professor of Communication Disorders at both Southern Illinois University and Emerson College, Boston, where he developed specialty tracks in language disabilities and autism in the Master’s and Doctoral programs. In 1984, he also founded and was the Director of the Communication Disorders Department at Bradley Hospital, the first such department in a pediatric psychiatric setting internationally, with an Associate Professor Appointment in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Brown University Program in Medicine. He then completed an Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Intervention at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Since 1998, Barry has been Director of Childhood Communication Services, a private practice, and he rejoined the faculty at Brown University, where he served as an Adjunct Professor in the Center for the Study of Human Development and the Artists and Scientists as Partners Group. Since 2022, he has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Rhode Island in the Communicative Disorders Department.  

Barry began his career as a teenager, when he served as a residential camp counselor for children and adults with disabilities, and then continued to do so for the next 5 summers. Those early summer camp experiences of living with and being responsible for the well-being, safety and happiness of people with disabilities were seminal in setting the path for his subsequent life’s mission. He has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with social-communication disabilities and autism and their families in hospital, school and university clinic settings, and consults widely to schools and agencies in New England as well and nationally and internationally, from early intervention through high school settings and community residential settings. Concurrently, his college studies at State University of New York at Binghamton in Psycholinguistics and SUNY at Buffalo in Communication Disorders and Sciences and child development provided his focus on communication disabilities and autism in children. Ever since, Barry has continued his life’s journey by consulting to a variety of settings supporting people with disabling conditions and their families. 

Barry has published five books and more than 150 articles and chapters on autism, child development,  communication disorders and emotional and behavioral disorders, and has given more than 1000 seminars and workshops in all 50 states and 30 countries. He has served on the Editorial Board of six scholarly journals and wrote a regular column for Autism Spectrum Quarterly for five years. He is the co-author of the book Autism spectrum disorders: A developmental, transactional perspective (2000), the assessment instruments, The Communication and Symbolic Behavior (CSBS) Scales (1993) and The CSBS-Developmental Profile (2002) (with Dr. Amy Wetherby). Other research and clinical interests include early identification of young children with disabilities, impact of childhood disability on the family, family-centered support and treatment, understanding language and communicative characteristics of children with social-communicative disabilities including ASD, the relationships between communication disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders in children, and the positive impact of the creative and expressive arts on children and adults with disabling conditions.

Barry’s latest book (with Tom Fields-Meyer), written for a mainstream audience is Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism, published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster, with an expanded edition published in 2022 and an audiobook narrated by Barry. Uniquely Human is now published in 26 languages, has been the best selling book on autism since 2015, was selected as the featured book on autism by the United Nations in 2017, and was ranked by Book Authority as #1 of the “100 best books on autism of all time”.  With a wealth of inspiring stories and practical advice learned from thousands of children and older people on the autism spectrum and their families, Uniquely Human conveys a deep respect for the qualities in people on the autism spectrum. It offers a compassionate and insightful perspective that has been called “life-changing as well as uplifting”. He currently is working with his colleague, Tom Fields-Meyer on a new book focusing on neurodiversity.

Over the past two decades, Barry and his colleagues, Dr. Amy Laurent and Emily Rubin, have focused on developing and providing trainings on SCERTS Model (Social Communication-Emotional Regulation-Transactional Support) published in a comprehensive two volume manual, and designed to support individuals of all ages who have or are at-risk for social-communicative and emotional regulatory difficulties including autism, and their families. The SCERTS Model is an evidenced based framework now being implemented in more than a dozen countries with the manuals having been translated into Japanese, Italian and Korean with other translations in process, providing many unique opportunities for international collaboration and travel.

Barry co-hosts a podcast, Uniquely Human: The Podcast (www.uniquelyhuman.com), with his friend, Dave Finch, an autistic audio engineer and NY Times best selling author. With more than 130 episodes released to date, it has been ranked #1 of all disability podcasts with more than 1.5 million downloads, and has a 4.9/5.0 rating on Apple podcasts.

For the past 27 years, Barry has partnered with Community Autism Resources, a parent-run and parent-established family support center in developing and providing a weekend parent retreat attended each year by 60 parents of family members with autism. He coordinated the two day ASD Symposium for 20 years that raised funds to support the parent retreat, one of the first conferences to feature autistic self-advocates as keynote speakers.

Barry has received widespread recognition and many honors in his career. He was an invited speaker at the United Nations for World Autism Awareness Day on two occasions (2013 & 2017) and received the Divine Neurotypical Award of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (www.grasp.org), for contributions to improving quality of life for persons with autism spectrum disorders. Barry was the recipient of the 2005 Princeton University Eden Foundation Award for career contributions in autism, Fellowship in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Massachusetts Speech-Language Hearing Association Clinical Achievement Award on two occasions. In 2014, he received Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the highest recognition given to a member of ASHA (175,000 members). As a performing percussionist, Barry has a special interest in the positive impact of the performing arts on neurodivergent individuals and consults to two theatrical and musical performing arts organizations, The Miracle Project of Los Angeles, and the Spectrum Theatre Ensemble of Providence, RI.

Barry is the proud father of Noah, a 4th year medical student at Duke University and his wife is Dr. Elaine Meyer, an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Dept. of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Barry and Elaine have collaborated in publishing and presenting together on family-professional communication and relationships. Barry plays drums/percussion in a blues/roots band, enjoys hiking, fishing, biking and other outdoor activities, nurturing his many plants, and is an avid collector of Inuit, Native American and other indigenous art, and antiques.