After Austin (above) and his brother were diagnosed with autism, their mother Beth Malow, an expert in sleep disorders, began studying the link between autism and sleep.

When they were young, Matthew Belmonte and his older brother, John, were fascinated by the same obscure sights: the rise and fall of shadows under streetlights when walking down the street, or individual specks of dust revealed in a beam of sunlight. They both enjoyed rocking back and forth to the high-pitched hum emanating from an old television. But in at least one respect, the boys were markedly different: Matthew had a huge vocabulary, and John didn’t speak.

“Even though he wasn’t speaking, I had the sense that I saw what he saw, and he saw what I saw,” Belmonte recalls. “I always knew that he and I thought in the same way.”

John had been diagnosed with autism in 1964, a few years before Matthew was born. In 1998, their sister’s daughter was also diagnosed with autism.

Inspired partly by his family’s struggles, Matthew, an assistant professor at Cornell University, studies perceptual experiences and cognition in people with autism.

Among autism researchers, he is one of many with close family ties to the disorder.

Cindy Molloy had practiced pediatric emergency medicine for a decade when, in 1996, her daughter Shannon was diagnosed with autism. Molloy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, joined the autism advocacy world and, three years on, pursued a Master’s degree in epidemiology to study potential immunological causes of the disorder.

Gregory Abowd, who develops video-capturing technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, first realized he could apply his work to autism in 2002, when he was reviewing family videos. Abowd’s 5-year-old son, Aidan, had been diagnosed with autism three years earlier. Watching footage of Aidan as a toddler, Abowd was shocked to see dramatic behavioral changes in his son between 18 and 26 months of age, including physical posturing and a discomfort around his mother.

“It was clear that he was just a very different child, but I hadn’t noticed the changes and neither had my wife,” Abowd recalls. They also missed early signs of autism in their second son, Blaise, who was diagnosed in 2003 at age 3.

Over the following few years, Abowd and his students began developing ’smart’ video technology that automatically records important events during therapy sessions by monitoring the therapist’s use of a pen and paper outfitted with electronic sensors. Since then, he has created similar systems to help teachers and parents identify early signs of developmental delay.

Having children with autism “gives me the desire to work on the problem, but also an understanding of how it impacts people like me,” Abowd says. “There’s nothing that beats having passion about something.

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