My Story
Dr. Morrier began his career in autism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the mentorship of Dr. Gail McGee (founder of the Walden Early Childhood Center). He relocated to Emory University with Dr. McGee after earning his Bachelor’s degree in psychology. Dr. Morrier received his Master’s degree in special education from the University of Georgia, under the mentorship of Dr. David Gast. Dr. Morrier earned his Ph.D. in special education with a focus on health disparities in identification and placement of preschoolers on the autism spectrum from Georgia State University under the mentorship of Dr. Peggy Gallagher.
Since 1991, Dr. Morrier worked in a variety of positions at the Emory Autism Center, in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, and became faculty in the Department in 2008. Throughout his career he has focused on embedded applied behavior analysis (ABA) into an individual’s natural environments in order to increase functional skills in those settings they will be sued and with the people with whom the skills will be used. He became certified as a behavior analyst (BCBA) in 2007 and reached his BCBA-Doctoral designation in 2008. During his 31 year tenure at the EAC, Dr. Morrier worked on both clinical and research projects aimed at providing evidence-based treatment and gold standard assessments, including conducting autism assessments for many research projects with colleagues at Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Georgia State University.
In 1997, Dr. Morrier reached research reliability on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (Rutter, Le Couteur, & Lord, 2030). He obtained research reliability on Modules 1-4 of the original Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule now in its second edition (Lord, Rutter, DiLavore, Risi, Gotham, & Bishop, 2012) in 1998, and was trained on the ADOS-2 Toddler Module (Lord, Luster, Gotham, & Guthrie, 2012) in 2009. Dr. Morrier became a Certified Independent Trainer on the ADOS-2 in 2022 and has lead or co-lead ADOS-2 trainings for a variety of agencies.
From 1999 – 2021, Dr. Morrier worked with the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM) assisting on the development, implementation, and ongoing data collection for their autism prevalence surveillance project. From 2015 until he left Emory in 2023, Dr. Morrier worked with leading licensed psychologists to train community-based psychologists and behavior therapists (including RBTs and BCBAs) on expanding Georgia’s capacity to identify, diagnosis and treat individuals with autism under age 5 years.
Dr. Morrier has been actively involved with the Georgia Subdivision of the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) serving as acting president (2015), President (2016-2021), Past President (2021-2022), and Membership Chair (2022 – present). He also takes part at the national level on DEC’s Research Committee and previously helped with revising DEC’s position statement on Ethical Practice for Early Interventionist/Early Childhood Special Educators.
Dr. Morrier is lead and co-author on multiple peer-reviewed publications and book chapters which focus on autism diagnosis and treatment. He was the co-author for a chapter on personnel preparation in the 3rd edition of the Handbook for Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder (2005). Dr. Morrier currently services on the editor boards of Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the Journal of Special Education, Infant and Child Development, and Frontiers in Pediatrics. His research focuses on early screening, identification, and diagnosis of children at increased likelihood of autism, including validation of remote diagnostic assessment tools. And he has taught numerous academic courses, as well as lectures, workshops, and continuing education seminars on topics including diagnostic assessment, treatment and intervention, and applied behavior analysis in natural environments.