Shelby Grebbin was Spectrum’s editorial assistant. Before joining Spectrum, she was staff assistant at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. As a freelance journalist, she has covered stories related to public health, data transparency and prison health care. Shelby has a B.A. in journalism from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.
Shelby Grebbin
Editorial Assistant
From this contributor
Researchers publish new dataset on minimally verbal autistic people
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published the first repository of vocalizations from minimally verbal autistic people. Those with few or no spoken words still produce a range of phonemes, or units of sound, that may serve as developmental markers or intervention targets.
Researchers publish new dataset on minimally verbal autistic people
By
Shelby Grebbin
18 May 2022 | 4 min read
Autism and menopause: Q&A with Rachel Moseley and Julie Turner-Cobb
Menopause poses significant challenges for autistic people, according to a small survey published in 2020 — the first to explore the transition among people with autism traits.
Autism and menopause: Q&A with Rachel Moseley and Julie Turner-Cobb
By
Shelby Grebbin
7 April 2022 | 5 min read
Web-based autism screening service raises a host of concerns
Neurona Health, a company in San Francisco, California, backed away from part of its newly launched services after Spectrum started reporting about them.
Web-based autism screening service raises a host of concerns
By
Shelby Grebbin
21 March 2022 | 6 min read
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A new atlas of abstracts visualizes the field of human brain mapping—where does your work fit?
Satrajit Ghosh talks to Mac Shine about a community-built tool that places every abstract from the 2026 Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting inside a semantic map of the broader neuroscience literature. Finding your neighbors in that space might matter more than you think.
A new atlas of abstracts visualizes the field of human brain mapping—where does your work fit?
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Key role of interferon 1 in maternal immune activation, and more
Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 1 June.
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9 June 2026 | 2 min read
The illusion of AI consciousness: Lessons from human unconscious processing
Complex, goal-directed and even emotionally responsive behavior can unfold without awareness, providing a useful lens for interpreting artificial systems.
The illusion of AI consciousness: Lessons from human unconscious processing
Complex, goal-directed and even emotionally responsive behavior can unfold without awareness, providing a useful lens for interpreting artificial systems.
By
Vanessa Hadid, Karim Jerbi, John W. Krakauer
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