News and Knowledge

OAR welcomed three interns to its office for the summer: Martin Larson, communications and scholarship intern, and Lauren Laverick-Brown and Jessie Stanek, both programs and community outreach interns.

Stanek is a 2014 graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder where she double majored in neuroscience and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Laverick-Brown traveled from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom to take the OAR internship. She just ended her first year of college and is working toward a degree in psychology. Larson will be a senior at Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., studying history and secondary education.

Larson is working with all the different communications media that OAR uses, including its Web site, blog, newsletter, and social media, to create a plan for how best to use them going forward. He will also work with the OAR Scholarship Program finalists to ensure that they provide all of the required paperwork by the deadline.

Larson’s goal is to learn as much as possible and to leave OAR having accomplished as much as he can. He is looking forward to being able to tell students and their parents that they were chosen as scholarship recipients. “I have enjoyed working with the staff and learning more about OAR,” he notes.

During her internship, Stanek will be helping to create a resource for parents and siblings to help guide siblings through the special challenges and joys of having a sibling on the spectrum. “I have a brother on the spectrum and my family has been involved with OAR for a long time. My dad and I have run races for OAR before. If there’s some way I could help typically developing siblings find a happy healthy role in their families and be a better brother or sister, that would be my biggest goal. 

“I love the organization’s focus on research and helping families navigate through the challenges of autism and wanted to be a part of it.”

Along with Stanek, Laverick-Brown will work on the resource for siblings of children with autism. “It’s important that we get an idea as to what siblings of children with autism would actually like to have available to them.” As the older sister of a brother with autism and Prader-Willi Syndrome, she has an extensive awareness of autism spectrum disorders. She’s been interested in learning disorders since she was 12 and spent last summer in the United States, assisting adults with a range of disabilities on their travels around the East Coast.

She enjoyed it so much, she says, she had to come back. “My research led me to OAR; I considered an internship with an organization as relevant and as prestigious to be the perfect next step towards achieving my ambitions. I am truly grateful for being chosen to be an intern.”