Alison Singer

Singer is the daughter of Rita and Gerald Tepper.^[1] She has an older autistic brother, Steven, who was institutionalized at Willowbrook State School as a child before being moved to Letchworth Village, and one younger brother. According to Singer, her mother encouraged her to only publicly acknowledge the existence of her younger brother.^[3] She has since become Steven's legal guardian.^[5]

Singer and husband Daniel married in 1994 at ages 27 and 29, respectively.^[1][3]

Singer has two daughters: Jodie (the oldest, born in 1997, who is autistic) and Lauren.^[3] According to Singer, when Lauren was due to receive the MMR vaccine in 1999, she chose to instead follow anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield's advice and separately administer vaccines for each disease it protected against. Singer claimed she did so in the hope it would reduce Lauren's likelihood of being autistic like Jodie, but subsequently recognized that her decision only placed Lauren's health at risk.^[6]

Singer graduated Yale University magna cum laude and earned a Master of Business Administration at Harvard University.^[1] She received an honorary degree from Emory University in May 2020.^[5]

In 2005, Autism Speaks co-founders Bob and Suzanne Wright hired Singer as the organization's first employee and named her its interim chief executive. Singer was serving as senior vice president of communications and strategy when she resigned from the organization in 2009. Singer co-founded ASF later that year.^[3][4][7]

Singer resigned from Autism Speaks because she did not believe it should spend any additional money on studying the scientifically discredited link between the MMR vaccine and autism or influence others to do so.^[3][8][9] At Autism Speaks, she was in a far more influential position and helped that organization become well known.^[10][4] During Singer's entire tenure at Autism Speaks, one of the organization's primary goals was to cure autistic people.^[11][12][13]

In 2010, Singer developed the C.A.S.E. approach as a means for clinicians to address vaccine hesitancy immediately and during the clinical encounter in which the hesitancy is raised.^[14] C.A.S.E. stands for Corroborate, About Me, Science, and Explain/Advise. With the C.A.S.E. approach, the clinician frames a response to the vaccine hesitant patient that corroborates awareness of the patient's hesitancy while identifying a shared underlying value or concern. Next, the clinician makes an about me statement, describing how the clinician went about getting a scientific answer to the concern. The clinician then summarizes the science underlying the recommendation and/or explanation addressing said concerns. Finally, the clinician explains the clinician's advice to the patient. The C.A.S.E. approach then might only consist of four sentences altogether, but it connects the patient to the clinician through the shared value or concern (corroborate), recognizes and employs the professional standing of the clinician (about me), relies on science to address the concern (science), and allows the clinician to reframe the recommendation addressing the concern of the patient (explain/advise).^[15][16][17]

In 2013, Singer appeared in a Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus profile, in which she claimed to be building a "pipeline of scientists" whom she expected to determine the cause(s) of autism within 10–15 years. She also said she learned the skills needed to run ASF during her time at HBS.^[18]

In 2024, speaking in her capacity as president of ASF, Singer defended the use of applied behavior analysis (a controversial operant-conditioning system widely opposed within the autistic rights movement^[19][20][21]) on autistic people with highly intensive support needs, including her own daughter. Singer claimed that critics were mostly autistic people with no communication delays or co-occurring intellectual disabilities who were wrongly recommended it as children.^[19] Singer had made similar statements on the topic in 2022, claiming that autistic people able to "articulate a nuanced criticism" of applied behavior analysis weren't among those who "really need[ed]" it.^[22] ASF, itself, has dismissed criticism of applied behavior analysis as outdated or misinformed and critics as part of a statistically irrelevant minority.^[23]

In 2025, speaking in her capacity as president of ASF, Singer reiterated that vaccines do not make people autistic, while also stating that she gave credit to recently appointed U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for "wanting to study the causes of autism."^[24] In a subsequent interview, Singer labeled Kennedy a "data denier," while also stating that she believed he had empathy for families of autistic people with highly intensive support needs and genuinely wanted to help them. Singer added that Kennedy agreed with her position that disproportionate focus was being placed on autistic people with less intensive support needs.^[25] Also in 2025, Singer pushed back on criticism of Kennedy's claim that autism was preventable, stating that ASF leadership "believe[d] strongly" that scientific research related to autism should be focused on prevention.^[26] The idea that the scientific community should work to prevent autism (or disability more generally) is a controversial one and has been labeled eugenic by some observers and critics.^{[27][28][29][30][31]}

Singer serves on the executive boards of the Marcus Autism Center at Emory, the Yale Child Study Center, the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine and the Autism Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[32]