Mark Blaxill is the father of a daughter diagnosed with autism, Chairman and co-founder of the Canary Party, Editor-at-Large for Age of Autism, a former director of SafeMinds and a frequent speaker at autism conferences.
He writes often on autism, science and public policy issues for Age of Autism and has published a number of articles, letters and commentaries on autism in journals such as Public Health Reports, the International Journal of Toxicology, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Neurotoxicology and Medical Hypotheses. He has also been invited to peer review articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Epidemiology, Pediatrics and the International Journal of Toxicology. As part of his advocacy work, he has testified before the Immunization Safety Review of the Institute of Medicine (2001), served on a Blue Ribbon Panel on Vaccine Safety (2004), initiated a symposium sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences entitled “Environmental Factors in Neurodevelopmental Disorders” (2005) and a workshop sponsored by the Institute of Medicine entitled “Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research” (2007). He was a panelist at a “Meeting on Evaluating Reasons for ASD Trends” co-sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Autism Speaks (2011) and at a hearing “1 in 88 Children: A Look Into the Federal Response to Rising Rates of Autism” called by the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee (2012).
He received a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. In his professional career, he spent 25 years at The Boston Consulting Group, where he was a Senior Vice President. Recently, he co-founded 3LP Advisors, an advisory firm focused on intellectual property transactions, where he is a Managing Partner. He recently co-authored a book on autism, called The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-made Epidemic, (Thomas Dunne, September 2010).