SEARCH Director Jan Blacher

Jan Blacher, Ph.D., a Professor, Graduate School of Education at UCR. She is known nationally for her research in the area of developmental disabilities, and has written extensively on such topics as:

• Longitudinal studies of family adjustment to a child with developmental disabilities
• The cultural context of disability (and autism)
• Dual-diagnosis in children and young adults
• Out-of-home placement of children and young adults

More recently, Dr. Blacher's work focuses on families and autism, with emphasis on autism in cultural context.

Dr. Blacher graduated with an A.B. from Brown University in Providence R.I. in 1975; she earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. Her vision for the SEARCH family autism resource center is based on over 25 years of research with hundreds of economically and culturally diverse families in Southern California who have children or young adults with disabilities.

Awards and Honors for Dr. Blacher include Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Fellow of the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR, now known as AAIDD). She was a term appointee on the National Research Council of The National Academy of Sciences that produced a study of disability determination for the Social Security Administration, and she was a member of the Rosalynn Carter Caregiving Expert Panel on Caregiving Across the Lifespan. She writes a column for Exceptional Parent (EP) magazine called "Research Reflections."