Throughout my career, I have worked in both community and research settings to better understand and help improve service systems for children with special needs. I am currently a PhD candidate in Educational Sciences, within the LEARN! interdisciplinary research institute at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In this position, I study the educational trajectories of students with special educational needs and the factors that influence them, with my advisors Dr. Mariëtte Huizinga (VU Amsterdam), Prof. dr. Anika Bexkens (Leiden University), and Prof. dr. Martijn Meeter (VU Amsterdam). As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, I have worked in schools and clinical centers, creating and implementing behavior support plans for children and adolescents with autism and other developmental disabilities for almost 10 years. I still periodically provide consultation to independent behavioral practitioners, and recently sat on an advice team for research on ABA, conducted by the Netherlands Autism Register at VU Amsterdam. During and after my master’s studies, I was a research assistant under Dr. Jessica Suhrheinrich at San Diego State University within the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center (CASRC), a multi-institution research consortium. Within this role, I studied the implementation of evidence-based practices (research-practice gap) for students with autism in schools.I moved from California to Amsterdam, Netherlands in the fall of 2019. After moving, I continued working remotely on in-preparation manuscripts for American research projects, while continuing my clinical career within the Dutch system up until I started the PhD candidate position.For more information about my PhD project, you can visit my VU profile: https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/brittney-v-root.