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Amy Lutz, PhD

National Council on Severe Autism (NCSA) Vice-President

Amy Lutz, PhD, is the mother of a severely autistic 23-year-old son, Jonah, and a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the history and ethics of autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her work has appeared in academic and mainstream journals, including The American Journal of Bioethics, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Slate. Her first book, Each Day I Like It Better: Autism, ECT, and the Treatment of Our Most Impaired Children, was published in 2014; her second, a collection of essays called We Walk: Life with Severe Autism, came out in 2020; and her third, Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severe Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Lutz lives outside of Philadelphia with her family.