Judy Singer

Judy Singer is an Australian sociologist who popularized the term "neurodiversity". After working as a computer consultant, Singer studied sociology at the University of Technology Sydney, where she was influenced by disability studies and Lorna Wing's conception of autism as a spectrum.

Singer's 1999 thesis, Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autism Spectrum, proposed understanding neurological differences as analogous to biodiversity, as more neutral and less pathologizing than traditional understandings of disabilities. Based on her thesis, she contributed a chapter to Disability Discourse. She later founded the Australian support group ASpar and published Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea (2016).