Uta Frith

Dame Uta Frith, born in 1941 in Rockenhausen, Germany, is a German-British developmental psychologist and emeritus professor of cognitive development at University College London. She trained in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and completed her doctorate in 1968 on pattern detection in autistic children. She pioneered research on autism and dyslexia. In 1985 she published with Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen a paper proposing that autistic people have specific difficulty understanding other peoples beliefs and desires, and she proposed weak central coherence, the idea that autistic people favor detail over integration. Her work on dyslexia argued against explanations based on low intelligence and, with Maggie Snowling, pointed to phonological processing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy, was made a Dame in 2012, and has championed women in science.