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The following is an excerpt from the book Reaching and Teaching Neurodivergent Learners: Strategies for Embracing Uniquely Talented Problem Solvers, by Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Senior Scientist at TERC, published November 14, 2023 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

My own graduate studies were in astrophysics, and still to this date I teach a university course on life in the universe. So when I was given a chance to interview Dr. Sara Seager for this book, I was a bit starstruck. She is a rock star in my field— a professor at MIT, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and the leader of several important NASA missions for the search for extraterrestrial life. She even has an equation named after her—the Seager equation—which is used to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy. She is also neurodivergent.

She was an adult before she realized she is autistic, though she always felt she acted differently somehow than people expected of her. When Sara was a child, she found it hard to make friends in part because she was always intensely focused on one thing, to the exclusion of others. She found this made it hard to find things to talk about with other people. Small talk is something she had to train herself to do, for other people’s sake. She says she’d just as well do without it, but she doesn’t want to be rude. Though, she adds, she loves talking with dogs.

Sara’s celebrated success doesn’t seem to be of much importance to her. She told me in our conversation that she likes the awards because they help her do more work and work with other outstanding scientists. The recognition doesn’t motivate her as much as the science itself. She is a persistent, curious, systematic, creative problem solver.

Sara senses that her brain runs faster than most people around her, and while that means she can get a tremendous amount of work done in a short amount of time, she also has to remind herself to put the brakes on occasionally to give others time to catch up. She sees her brain’s capacity for idea generation as a positive aspect of her neurodivergence. When she is working on a problem—especially when she can avoid the minutia of daily life—Sara says she has the space to make connections across all the information she knows and new information she’s learned. She can put ideas together to innovate new ideas. She explains:

Creativity in science is not just about choosing a great idea, but also figuring out how to solve the problem. To make advances in STEM, you have to have that light bulb go off in your head. That comes from intuition built over time. And my brain is good at putting all that information together to solve new problems.

Having attended Montessori school near Toronto for the first few years of her education, Sara loved the open-ended nature of learning where she could dwell as long as she liked in her favorite activity and wasn’t forced to follow someone else’s plan. Therefore, she was taken aback when she was moved to a public school in grade 3 where she found the class highly structured and focused on teacher-led lessons. As an inquisitive third grader, Sara was annoyed to be told to do what to do rather than to be allowed to follow her own curiosity. After attending Jarvis Collegiate Institute, a 200-year-old public high school known for its outstanding science education, Sara entered the University of Toronto as she said in an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, “with the idealistic view that anything and everything could be described by a physics equation.” Since then, pursuing huge questions about the nature of the cosmos and how to discover lifeforms on other worlds provides the wide-open cognitive spaces Sara craves for her generative mind.

While her father had encouraged her to become a physician, Sara followed her own line of inquiry in graduate school and beyond. She finally was given the liberty to take one subject, astrophysics, and explore it to its fullest detail. “That’s what I had been wanting to do all along,” she says. “I had a good education, and I suppose all those other classes were useful to help make me a well-rounded thinker and all, but I only really cared about the courses that helped me answer the questions I was thinking about at the time.”

When I asked Sara if she would change anything about how her brain works, she immediately replied with a firm “no.” She attributes her neurodiversity as the reason she can get so much done. Sara says the way her brain can remain hyper-focused on a problem allows her to remain in a state of flow, intently focused on a task for hours at a time, and this comes easily to her. It is her place of comfort. “I get so much done in a small amount of time. I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she says.

Sara says that to collaborate well with colleagues and to be an effective teacher, she has had to develop explicit strategies for communication. She says she has to remember to give others time to form their own thoughts, so she doesn’t come across as rude or insensitive. Sara was about 11 when she started to realize that body language was key to understanding other people’s perspectives. Not being able to figure it out on her own, Sara went to the library and read every book she could on it. As a scientist, she took the scholarly route to learning social behaviors.

Sara says she’s had to manage her own expectations and learn how to make small talk since that is what helps others feel comfortable. She and a neurodivergent colleague created a guidebook for themselves to help them work with other scientists and students. The book included cues to remember in different social situations such as a reminder to count to ten to give others a chance to speak. Their guidebook also includes a list of topics most people are interested in—such as dogs, kids, and the weather—though the small talk is of little interest to her. She and her colleague used this guide to help learn how to interact the way others expected her to, how to act in a way that others thought was “normal.”

Sara sometimes wonders why it was the neurodivergent people who had to create the guidelines book—why there isn’t a guidebook for others to learn how to work with people like her. Pragmatically, she suggests it’s likely because majority rules. “That’s the way the world works,” she says flatly. “I just wish I got the guidebook at a younger age. I would have liked to know earlier how I was expected to act.”

The biggest thing Sara says she would change about neurodiversity is not the differences themselves, but rather other people’s perspectives about neurodiversity. She’d like to see neurodivergent children treated differently in school to remove the stigmatization. She credits her father for her experience of growing up relatively unscathed by this stigmatization because he made her feel loved despite her quirky intelligence. Sara fears many kids aren’t as fortunate and get left behind, noting that, “Students can’t reach their potential when shame is attached.”