Karen Zelan was trained in psychoanalytic milieu therapy at the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School, where she worked for eight years as a therapist to troubled youth, including children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

    She studied music and psychology at Oberlin College where she received her B.A. She received her M.A. in Educational Psychology at the University of Chicago. She received the Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

   She has held faculty appointments at San Francisco State University, Wheelock College, the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, and the California School of Professional Psychology. She served as a Senior Staff Supervising Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston’s Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. She has worked as a psychotherapist to troubled youth for over forty years.

   Her most recent book, Between Their World and Ours: Breakthroughs with Autistic Children (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), covers her extensive work with autistic youth, beginning in 1956 at the University of Chicago and continuing to the present in private practice.