Gina Richig

I work in a clinic setting that provides applied behavior analysis services to children with autism and developmental needs. The clinic operates like a school with play-based teaching to make learning fun and enjoyable for the kids. As a supervisor, I lead a team of 7 to 8 therapists and oversee their work with a variety of children. My days begin with morning meetings where I provide training to enhance our services, and I spend time throughout the day meeting with families to provide coaching and guidance on navigating challenges in home and community settings. A major focus of my work is functional communication, where I teach children to use alternative communication devices ordered through speech providers. By teaching them to ask for what they want and need using these devices and rewarding that communication, we typically see challenging behaviors like aggression and self-injury decrease because they've found better ways to get their wants and needs met. I overlap with my kids during the day to update their programming and coach their therapists on more effective implementation strategies. At the end of each day, we have wrap-up meetings where we graph the data to see how the kids did and decompress as a team. I specialize in early intervention because it's such an important time to teach kids to communicate while they're younger, preventing behaviors from escalating as they get older. My most notable professional achievement is helping learners to the point where they're able to graduate and go to public school settings. Looking ahead, I'm really wanting to grow in my career and work on training other behavior analysts, so that instead of helping kids directly, I'm able to support even more learners through other professionals.