Board of Directors
Matthew Lerner
Founding Director, Spotlight Program; Doctoral Student
Matthew Lerner is the founding Director of the Spotlight Program at the North Shore Arc in Danvers, Massachusetts. Having begun as a summer program, Spotlight has expanded to after school, weekend, and vacation models, and the program is in the process of expanding to several sites throughout the eastern part of Massachusetts. Spotlight services approximately 150 students year-round, garnering support from the Massachusetts DMR – Autism Division as well as more than two dozen individual school districts.
Mr. Lerner is also a program effectiveness research project co-Director at Cambridge Health Alliance, where he is the recipient of a grant from Bank of America's Deborah Munroe Noonan Fund to investigate the effectiveness of drama-based social pragmatics on its target population. He is also a consultant for various research projects investigating novel software-based social skills interventions. Mr. Lerner also provides program consultation to schools and human service organizations in designing programming for adolescents on the autism spectrum. Most recently, he is the recipient of the prestigious Jefferson Fellowship at the University of Virginia, where he conducts research on school- and community-based interventions to improve social-emotional functioning in children and teenagers.
