Barry has more than 40 years experience as a clinical scholar, consultant, researcher and program consultant to children and older persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and related developmental disabilities and their families. He is a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist and holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC-SLP) of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Barry has served as a tenured Professor in two University Graduate Programs, and as Founder and Director of the Communication Disorders Department at Bradley Hospital in the Brown University Program in Medicine. He has received many honors in his career, including the Princeton University-Eden Foundation Fellowship award for career contributions in developing services for persons with autism (2005), Fellowship in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Massachusetts Speech-Language Hearing Association Clinical Achievement Award on two occasions.

Barry began his career in 1969, as a teenager, when he served as a residential camp counselor for children and adults with disabilities, and then continued to do so for the next 4 summers as his college studies at SUNY at Binghamton in Psycholinguistics and SUNY at Buffalo in Communication Disorders became focused on communication disabilities in children. He still considers those early summer camp experiences of living with and being responsible for the care of people with disabilities as seminal in setting the path for his subsequent career. Barry continued his life's journey maintaining a focus on supporting people with disabilities and their families throughout his Master's and Doctoral studies in Communication Disorders and Child Development.

Since 1998, Barry has been Director of Childhood Communication Services (CCS), a private practice, and serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Center for the Study of Human Development, Brown University. He has published more than 100 articles and chapters on childhood communication disorders and child development, has given more than 600 seminars and workshops at national and international conferences, serves on the Editorial Board of six scholarly journals and writes a regular column for Autism Spectrum Quarterly. Formerly, Barry was an Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry in the Brown University Program in Medicine and Director of Communication Disorders and at Bradley Hospital, Providence, RI, Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Emerson College, Boston, and an Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Intervention at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with social-communication disabilities and ASD and their families in hospital and university clinic settings, and consults widely to schools and agencies locally in New England, as well and nationally and internationally.

Barry and his colleagues' recent work has focused on developing the SCERTS® Model (Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, Laurent and Rydell, 2006) for children who have or are at-risk for social-communicative difficulties including autism, and their families. The SCERTS Model is now being adopted nationally and internationally, and has provided many unique opportunities for international collaboration and travel. For further information on The SCERTS Model, please click on The SCERTS Model Tab.

Barry also is the co-author of the book Autism spectrum disorders: A developmental, transactional perspective (2000), the assessment instruments, The Communication and Symbolic Behavior (CSBS) Scales (1993) and The CSBS-Developmental Profile (2002) (with Dr. Amy Wetherby). Other research and clinical interests include early identification of young children with disabilities, impact of childhood disability on the family, family-centered support and treatment, understanding language and communicative characteristics of children with social-communicative disabilities including ASD, and the relationships between communication disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders in children.

Over the past 16 years, Barry had developed and co-facilitates an annual parent weekend retreat attended by 60 parents of children with autism each year. He has collaborated with Community Autism Resources, a parent run family support center, in organizing an annual fundraising conference (ASD Symposium) that has raised more than $400,000. dollars to support family activities and the annual parent.

Barry is the proud father of 14 year old Noah who keeps him young and running, and is married to Dr. Elaine Meyer, an Associate Professor and Director, Center for Professionalism and Ethical Practice in the Harvard Medical School. In his spare time, Barry plays drums in a band, and is an avid collector of Inuit and other indigenous art, and antiques.