The brothers then went into banking, and when Jay Cooke's firm collapsed, they received thousands of acres of undeveloped land in North Dakota as debt collateral.

[5][11] Although raised in the Episcopal Church, early on Grandin gave up on a belief in a personal deity or intention in favor of a more scientific perspective.

When she was two, the only formal diagnosis given to her was "brain damage",[13][14] a finding finally dismissed through cerebral imaging at the University of Utah by the time she turned 63 in 2010.

[21] Grandin's mother took her to the world's leading special needs researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital, with the hope of finding an alternative to institutionalization.

[9] At 15 Grandin spent a summer on the Arizona ranch of Ben Cutler's sister, Ann, and this would become a formative experience toward her subsequent career interest.

That school was founded in 1948 by Boston child psychologist, Henry Patey, for the students of "exceptional potential (gifted) that have not been successful in a typical setting".

At HCS, Grandin met William Carlock, a science teacher who had worked for NASA, who became her mentor and helped her significantly toward building up her self-confidence.

[25] It was Carlock who encouraged Grandin to develop her idea to build her squeeze machine (hug box) when she returned from her aunt's farm in Arizona in her senior year of high school.

Steve Silberman, in his book NeuroTribes, wrote that Grandin helped break down years of shame and stigma because she was one of the first adults to publicly disclose that she was autistic.

By the time the expanded edition was published in 2006, she had realized that it had been wrong to presume that every person with autism processed information in the same way she did.

Grandin became well-known beyond the American autistic community, after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), for which he won a Polk Award.

She says words are her second language and that she thinks "totally in pictures", using her vast visual memory to translate information into a mental slideshow of images that may be manipulated or correlated.

[28] Grandin attributes her success as a humane livestock facility designer to her ability to recall detail, which is a characteristic of her visual memory.

She was one of the first scientists to report that animals are sensitive to visual distractions in handling facilities such as shadows, dangling chains, and other environmental details that most people do not notice.

In her academic work as a professor at Colorado State University, her graduate student Bridgett Voisinet conducted one of the early studies that demonstrated that cattle who remained calm during handling had higher weight gains.

A major piece of equipment that Grandin developed was a center track (double rail) conveyor restrainer system for holding cattle during stunning at large beef slaughtering plants.

It is described in "Double Rail Restrainer Conveyor for Livestock Handling", first published in the Journal of Agricultural Engineering Research, Vol.

This work is described in "Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices in slaughter plants", Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol.

121–128, and "Effect of animal welfare audits of slaughter plants by a major fast food company on cattle handling and stunning practices", Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Vol.

The book contains a review of the main aspects of cattle behavior and provides a visual guide in the form of construction plans and diagrams for the implementation of Grandin's ideas relating to humane livestock handling.

[citation needed] Grandin helped design animal processing plants at the White Oak Pastures organic farm in Bluffton, Georgia.

Grandin has lectured widely about her first-hand experiences of the anxiety of feeling threatened by everything in her surroundings, and of being dismissed and feared, which motivates her work in humane livestock handling processes.

Grandin then designed curved corrals she adapted with the intention of reducing stress, panic, and injury in animals being led to slaughter.

Her insight into the minds of cattle has taught her to value the changes in details to which animals are particularly sensitive and to use her visualization skills to design thoughtful and humane animal-handling equipment.

[38] In 2012, when the American beef industry was struggling with public perception of its use and sale of pink slime, Grandin spoke out in support of the food product.

Andy Lamey has argued that while Grandin's method of slaughter is a significant positive development for animals, her attempts to formulate a moral defense of meat-eating have been less successful.

"[42] When she was in boarding school, Grandin chose to live a celibate life and, in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2013, stated, "Now I'm old enough to where sexual urges are all gone, and it's like, good riddance.

Grandin was featured in Beautiful Minds: A Voyage Into the Brain, a documentary produced in 2006 by Colourfield Tell-A-Vision, a German company.

[69] In 2023, I am Temple Grandin was added to the children's book series known as "Ordinary People Change the World" by author Brad Meltzer and illustrator Chris Eliopoulos.

"[70][71] In 2024, Grandin was profiled in a biographical chapter bearing her name in the book Don't Mourn for Us: The Autistic Life of Jim Sinclair and an Extraordinary Story of Neurodiversity, and was described as "the superstar of the autism community.