Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference

Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference

The OPI Montana Autism Education Project, in collaboration with The Montana Center for Inclusive Education and Institute for Neurodiversity at Montana State University Billings (MSUB), is pleased to host the first annual Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference at MSUB, September 19-20, 2025, with a pre-conference intensive behavior workshop for educators on September 18, 2025.

This is a free conference designed for educators, related service providers, families, and advocates. The conference will feature leading experts in the field alongside a panel of autistic and neurodiverse individuals, sharing their lived experiences, evidence-based approaches, and tools to support meaningful inclusion across educational and community settings.

Featured Speakers

Dr. Jessica Minahan, Ph.D., BCBA, LABA, is a licensed and board-certified behavior analyst, author, special educator, and consultant to schools internationally. Since 2000 she has worked with students who struggle with mental health issues and challenging behavior in public school systems. She specializes in training staff and creating behavior intervention plans for students who demonstrate explosive and unsafe behavior. She also works with students with emotional and behavioral disabilities, anxiety disorders, trauma histories, and Autism. Her particular interest is to serve these students by combining behavioral interventions with a comprehensive knowledge of best practices for those with complex mental health profiles and learning needs.

She is a blogger on The Huffington Post, the author of The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students with Nancy Rappaport (Harvard Education Press, 2012), and the author of The Behavior Code Companion: Strategies, Tools, and Interventions for Supporting Students with Anxiety-Related or Oppositional Behaviors (Harvard Education Press, 2014).

She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Lesley University, a BS in Intensive Special Education from Boston University, and a dual master’s degree in Special Education and Elementary Education from Wheelock College. She has a certificate of graduate study (CGS) in teaching children with Autism from the University of Albany and received her BCBA training from Northeastern University in Boston. She is sought-after internationally to speak on subjects ranging from effective interventions for students with anxiety to supporting hard-to-reach students in full-inclusion public school settings.

Dr. Barry M. Prizant, Ph.D., CCC-SLP 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. 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.

Michael McCreary is an autistic comedian, actor, author and TEDX speaker who’s been performing stand-up comedy since age 13. In the past 10 years, he has performed stand-up shows and keynote addresses in every province in Canada – plus the Yukon - and across the United States. He has done shows for tech giants IBM and SAP International; for universities such as McMaster, Queen’s, McGill, Montana State U and the University of Texas; and for many agencies and autism organizations: Autism Ontario, Autism Canada, Autism Nova Scotia, Autism Asperger’s Friendship Society (Calgary), Firefly Autism (Denver), Autism Yukon, Geneva Centre for Autism, Autism Society Newfoundland & Labrador, Pacific Autism Family Network; and for schools and school boards across the continent.
Michael has also written the book “Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic” (Annick Press); hosted the Autism Ontario video “Autism: See the Potential” https://vimeo.com/144769608; has consulted on the TV show “Ransom” to ensure the authenticity of a character with autism and has been featured on The National and on CBC Radio’s “Laugh Out Loud!”
He was the featured comic in Commander Chris Hadfield’s Generator show at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f2W30iYP30
He played the role of a neurodivergent character "Eggs" in the TV series Astrid & Lilly Save the World (SYFY Network) and he can also be seen in Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia (Netflix).

Michael McCreary gives you permission to laugh at the lighter side of the Autism Spectrum.