Grandin, Temple, 1947–, American animal scientist and industrial designer, b. Boston, grad. Franklin Pierce College (B.A., 1970), Arizona State Univ. (M.S., 1975), Univ. of Illinois (Ph.D., 1989). Diagnosed with autism as a child, she was sent to specialized schools that enabled her to utilize her high IQ. Likening autistic individuals' extreme sensitivity to sensory stimulation and other traits to those possessed by animals, she has worked to improve conditions for livestock, ensuring that their lives and deaths are as free from fear as possible. The humane methods she developed to handle food animals, e.g., high rounded chutes, and the industry guidelines she created have bettered conditions for livestock while simultaneously imcreasing plant efficiency. Grandin is also an advocate for the autistic; she has lectured widely and developed a “squeeze box,” used to soothe autistic people. A professor at Colorado State Univ., she has written several books, among them Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships (with S. Barron, 2005), Animals in Translation (with C. Johnson, 2006), and Animals Make Us Human (2009).
See her Emergence: Labeled Autistic (with M. M. Scariano, 1986, repr. 1996), her memoir Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995), and The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's (2008); A. W. Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (1995).
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