Barry has more than 50 years experience as a clinical scholar, consultant, researcher and program consultant to children and older persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and related neurodevelopmental disabilities 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 Southern Illinois University and Emerson College, Boston, where he developed specialty tracks in language disabilities and autism in the Master’s and Doctoral programs. He also was Founder and Director of the Communication Disorders Department at Bradley Hospital, with an Associate Professor Appointment in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Brown University Program in Medicine, and was an Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Intervention at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Barry has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with social-communication disabilities and ASD 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. Barry began his career in 1969, 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 care of people with disabilities were seminal in setting the path for his subsequent career. Concurrently, his college studies at SUNY at Binghamton in Psycholinguistics and SUNY at Buffalo in Communication Disorders became focused on communication disabilities in children and autism. In the 1970’s, Barry continued his life’s journey maintaining a focus on supporting people with disabilities and their families throughout his Master’s and Doctoral studies in Communication Disorders and Child and Human Development. Since 1998, Barry has been Director of Childhood Communication Services (CCS), a private practice, and at Brown University, he has served as an Adjunct Professor in the Center for the Study of Human Development, and currently in the Artists and Scientists as Partners Group. He has published more than 150 articles and chapters on autism, childhood communication disorders and child development, has given more than 1000 seminars and workshops in all 50 states and 30 countries.

Barry has served on the Editorial Board of six scholarly journals and wrote a regular column for Autism Spectrum Quarterly for five years. Barry 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, and the relationships between communication disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders in children.

His 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. Uniquely Human is now published in 26 languages, 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 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”.

Barry also 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.

Over the past two decades, Barry and his colleagues work has also focused on developing the SCERTS Model for individuals who have or are at-risk for social-communicative difficulties including autism, and their families. The SCERTS Model is an evidenced based framework now being implemented in 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 has partnered with Community Autism Resources, a parent-run and parent-established family support center for the past 26 years in developing and providing a weekend parent retreat for 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 3rd year medical student at Duke University, and is married to 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 and outdoor activities, and is an avid collector of Inuit, Native American and other indigenous art, and antiques.