NOTE: This is one in a series of articles on Brock’s 2025-26 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients. Read other stories in the series on The Brock News.

As researchers, Asude Ayvaci (MA ’24) and Kevin Yu (MA ’24) are determined to improve the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The PhD in Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) students, and Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients, believe their work could change clinical decision-making and operations for the better for both clients and clinicians.

Ayvaci’s work centres around interventions for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities who display severe challenging behaviours.

“In our field, we view challenging behaviour as learned behaviour or as a learned response to the environment — so, it might be that an individual who doesn’t have the skills to ask for something may engage in aggression to get someone’s attention instead,” she says.

Ayvaci’s master’s research, conducted under the supervision of Associate Professor Alison Cox, explored how the use of restraints on young people with severe challenging behaviours could be limited by training clinicians to identify patterns of escalation.

Now in her first year of doctoral studies, she is turning her attention to how a combination of behaviour analysis assessments and the monitoring of psychotropic medication, which she notes can be a form of “chemical restraint,” could improve outcomes.

“As behaviour analysts, we can monitor the effects of medications with our assessments to see how medication and medication changes affect an individual, especially individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities who don’t always have the ability to tell a psychiatrist how a medication makes them feel,” she says.

Continuing her work with Cox, Ayvaci hopes that by assessing behaviour before and after a medication change, it will be possible to better determine the effects of different medications and dosages on individuals.

“As clinicians, we need to work together to see how can we best support each individual,” she says. “Can we teach skills instead of using medication to affect behaviour? Can we reduce medication?”

Yu, who holds a master’s degree in developmental psychology and education as well as a Master of Arts from Brock’s Department of Applied Disability Studies, says his research interest in strengths-focused ABA stems from his professional experience.

“I came into the master’s program with a perspective that there was too much focus on deficits around autism and behaviour analysis,” he says. “I wanted to shift that focus and provide balance by incorporating strengths to see how that could change different relationships.”

His Brock master’s research, completed under the supervision of Associate Professor Priscilla Burnham Riosa, involved teaching parents to observe strengths in their autistic children and then seeing whether those observations could improve parent-child relationships or change how parents felt about their own parenting.

As a doctoral student, Yu continues working with Burnham Riosa to explore the value of focusing on strengths in the context of providing effective ABA services.

“I want to look at using strengths at an organizational level in ABA, seeing how supervisors can utilize strengths-based approaches to see what effect that may have on burnout, work engagement, work-related stress and intervention outcomes,” he says.

In his own clinical work, Yu observed that colleagues often face high workloads contributing to staff burnout. When that happens, he says the consequences are many, both for the professional and for the individuals with disabilities who have built up a trusting relationship with them.

“Burnout is common within the field and can often lead to outcomes such as turnover among professionals and inconsistent implementation of supports,” he says. “That slows down client progress and effective intervention delivery.”

Yu thinks a potential solution may lie in training supervisors to use strengths-based approaches to support their teams.

While the research is fairly novel, he is excited to dive into the literature and, in the future, work with community partners to better support the management of ABA service providers to maximize the benefits for clients and their families.