Christina Nicolaidis, M.D., M.P.H.

Christina Nicolaidis, MD, MPH serves as a Consultant on the ACE grant. She is a Professor in the School of Social Work at Portland State University (PSU), with a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). She completed her undergraduate, medical, and public health education at Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Washington, respectively; her internal medicine training at OHSU; and her research training in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. Dr. Nicolaidis uses community based participatory research (CBPR) to improve the health and healthcare of autistic adults and members of other marginalized populations. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Academic Autism Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education (AASPIRE; www.aaspire.org); was the principal investigator (PI) on a series of NIH-funded studies to develop and test the AASPIRE Healthcare Toolkit (www.autismandhealth.org); and is currently the PI on a large NIH-funded AASPIRE project to develop and test patient-reported outcome measures for evaluating the effectiveness of services for autistic adults (www.aaspire.org/projects/outcomes). She also is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Autism in Adulthood (www.liebertpub.com/aut) and the Director of the Social Determinants of Health Initiative (www.pdx.edu/social-determinants-health). She teaches research methods at PSU, practices internal medicine at OHSU, and mentors dozens of junior faculty members and trainees across the world. When not at work, she enjoys traveling, glass fusing, hanging out with family and friends, and just lying around wasting time.