AMES, Iowa – A leading author on the topics of autism and animal behavior will deliver a lecture at Iowa State University on Thursday, Feb. 2.
Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She also has a successful career consulting on both livestock handling equipment design and animal welfare. Grandin’s lecture, titled “Let’s Talk About Pets,” will take place on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 7 p.m. in the Memorial Union Great Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Grandin has been featured on NPR (National Public Radio) and a BBC Special called “The Woman Who Thinks like a Cow.” She has also appeared on national television shows such as “Larry King Live,” “20/20,” “60 Minutes,” “Fox and Friends,” and she delivered a TED talk in 2010. She’s been covered in publications such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Discover Magazine, Forbes and USA Today. HBO made an Emmy Award-winning movie about her life, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Grandin did not talk until she was 3-and-a-half years old. She was fortunate to get early speech therapy. Her teachers also taught her how to wait and take turns when playing board games. She was mainstreamed into a normal kindergarten at age 5. Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote in the forward of “Thinking in Pictures” that her first book, “Emergence: Labeled Autistic,” was “unprecedented because there had never before been an inside narrative of autism.” Sacks profiled Grandin in his best-selling book “Anthropologist on Mars.”
This event will be recorded and available for two weeks on the Lectures website at https://www.lectures.iastate.edu/recordings/available-recordings.
Subject to approval by the Iowa Board of Regents, Iowa State University will present Grandin with an honorary degree at this semester’s commencement ceremony on May 13.
