Katharine Beals is the author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School. She has a PhD in linguistics and is an adjunct professor in the Autism Program at the Drexel University School of Education, where she designed two of the program's five courses.

She also teaches courses on autism at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in language and literacy acquisition in autism, language technologies for autistic individuals, educational challenges for students with autism, and the problems with Facilitated Communication as an intervention in autism.

She is a contributor at FacilitatedCommunication.org and also an autism parent.