Madeline Marie Asaro (MA '20) is driven by passion for research and compassion for clients and families.
The Brock University PhD in Applied Behaviour Analysis student, whose research centres on food selectivity among autistic children, was recently recognized by the Council of Ontario's Universities with a 2025 Autism Scholars Award.
Brock PhD student Madeline Marie Asaro (MA '20) recently received a provincial award to support her research into food refusal among children with autism and evidence-based methods for approaching food selectivity that can be shared with caregivers.
She first became interested in compassionate behavioural interventions to help support children who refuse foods while working in Associate Professor Kimberley Zonneveld's lab as a master's student.
While her own research at the time was unrelated, she was fascinated by discussions about pediatric feeding taking place among her colleagues and supervisor, who has extensive experience in this area.
After graduating, Asaro spent several years working clinically before returning to Brock to begin a PhD in Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) last fall under Zonneveld's supervision. Her work in the field highlighted a need for support with feeding and food selectivity.
"Among so many families I worked with, an area of concern that kept coming up was that their child wasn't eating enough foods or wasn't eating healthy foods," says Asaro. "It became a significant issue for the child, compromising their health, growth and ability to fully engage in daily life, including many social and cultural aspects of family life."
Asaro now aims to determine how best to support caregivers in implementing feeding protocol through a practice known as caregiver-mediated service.
"In caregiver-mediated services, we coach caregivers to implement the interventions with their children," she says. "I think it's a beautiful experience to have caregivers enact change and see that they're the ones making changes in their child's behaviour."
Asaro is in the initial phase of her research, which will centre around the evaluation of a recently published feeding protocol and the development of a caregiver-mediated version.
"I want to evaluate its effectiveness first, because it's a newer approach, and then extend it to be caregiver-mediated," she says. "The final step of the project will be evaluating a telehealth video model delivery to see whether we can reach families in remote communities or communities where behaviour analysts aren't available."
Asaro says the combination of components in her project is intentionally designed to help meet the current needs of families in Ontario and Canada, who are always top of mind for her, but can be extended anywhere.
She is determined to produce and share research that can be put to practical use to benefit children, caregivers and clinicians and says the award, which is given to scholars conducting pioneering research impacting individuals with autism and their families, was a humbling acknowledgment of the social significance she hopes her work will have.
"The award highlights research that can positively impact individuals with autism and their families," she says. "I'm really excited to see this work transcend into the clinical space, because meaningful impact is my goal families and clients inspired me to do this work."
Zonneveld, who is also the Graduate Program Director in Applied Disability Studies, says Asaro's work "exemplifies the type of applied, socially meaningful research we strive to promote in our graduate programs."
"Madeline's project not only advances emerging clinical practices in pediatric feeding but also reflects our commitment to generating evidence-based approaches that directly support families," Zonneveld says. "It is particularly meaningful that her work has been recognized with this award, marking the first time a student from Brock University has received this distinction."
