He attended the Upper Canada College[2] before going to study at McMaster University, where he majored in philosophy and psychology.
He completed his residency training at the same institution with British psychiatrist David Charles Taylor.
He was also the director of the research training program in the department, and a member of the Offord Centre for Child Studies.
[4] In 2013, Szatmari moved to the Hospital for Sick Children and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
[9] Szatmari's diagnostic criteria were published in 1989 and cover five main areas: solitary (i.e. lack of friends), impaired social interaction (i.e. difficulty relating to others), impaired nonverbal communication (i.e. not understanding body language), odd speech patterns (i.e. different use of words), and that Asperger syndrome does not meet the criteria for autistic disorder as defined in the DSM-III-R.[7] Szatmari suggests that AS was promoted as a diagnosis to spark more research into the syndrome: "It was introduced into the official classification systems in 1994 and has grown in popularity as a diagnosis, even though its validity has not been clearly established.