Raun D. Melmed, MD, co-founder and medical director of the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center, is a developmental and behavioral pediatrician and is director of the Melmed Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Translational Genomics Institute in Phoenix and on faculty at Arizona State University. Dr. Melmed earned his medical degree at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa, and completed a fellowship at the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, where he was an Instructor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Melmed is a member of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and the Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is board certified in Pediatrics as well as in Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
The author or coauthor of more than 70 publications, he has set up nationally recognized physician training programs for the early identification of infants and toddlers with developmental and behavioral concerns and authored a program geared toward the early screening for autism spectrum disorders. He is the co-author of Succeeding with Difficult Children and Autism: Early Intervention. Dr. Melmed is currently a principal investigator of novel psychopharmacological agents in the treatment of autism, Fragile X and ADHD and collaborates on studies of tools used in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders.