Fred Robert Volkmar (born 1950 in Illinois)[1] is a psychiatrist, psychologist, and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the Yale School of Medicine.
[2][3] As an undergraduate, Volkmar published or collected data for seven papers; his first publication (Rearing complexity affects branching of dendrites in the visual cortex of the rat) appeared in Science[1][4] and earned him the Psi Chi national prize for research.
[3] During his time at the University of Illinois, Volkmar first came into contact with autism, and at the suggestion of a professor decided to pursue child psychology.
[6] Volkmar was appointed director of the Yale Child Study Center in 2006, succeeding Alan E Kazdin,[5] and served until 2014.
[1] Volkmar was the lead author of the section on autism in the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) published in 1994,[3][5] which saw the introduction of Asperger syndrome as a diagnosis.