Dr. Stephanie Colón is the Founder and CEO of NeuroMosaic Supports, LLC. As an autistic adult and the mother of an autistic child, Stephanie brings lived experience together with professional, academic, and research expertise in autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and community-based supports.

Stephanie’s journey into the disability field began in 2013, when her daughter was diagnosed as autistic. Like many parents, she quickly discovered that families are not handed a guidebook explaining autism, neurodiversity, disability systems, or how to navigate the supports their child may need throughout life. Her desire to better understand her daughter’s experience became the beginning of an academic and professional journey centered not on changing autistic people, but on understanding how environments and systems can better recognize, include, and support them.

Her professional experience began in the school system working with elementary-aged children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She later transitioned into community-based disability services, working in direct supports case management and coordinating services for adults with IDD before moving into service coordination and leadership within Maryland’s Coordination of Community Services (CCS) system.

Through this work, Stephanie developed relationships with disabled adults, families, Direct Support Professionals, providers, and other professionals across Maryland’s disability service system. She heard families describe the challenges of finding and maintaining consistent, high-quality supports for their adult children. At the same time, her work alongside Direct Support Professionals gave her insight into the challenges faced by the workforce itself, including inadequate preparation, organizational barriers, burnout, turnover, and the difficulty of sustaining this essential work within systems that do not always adequately value those providing direct support.

Those experiences ultimately propelled Stephanie into her doctoral research. She earned her PhD in Autism Studies from Towson University, where her research examined the experiences of Direct Support Professionals supporting autistic adults within Maryland’s Home and Community-Based Services system. Her work explored DSP preparedness, wellbeing, relationships, advocacy, workforce sustainability, and the systemic and organizational conditions that shape their ability to provide consistent, person-centered support.

Stephanie’s philosophy is grounded in neurodiversity and the social model of disability. Rather than asking how disabled people can be changed to better fit existing environments, she believes we should ask how environments, organizations, policies, and systems can change to better support disabled people.

NeuroMosaic Supports grew from that philosophy and from more than a decade of listening—to disabled people, families, DSPs, and professionals navigating these systems every day. Stephanie founded NeuroMosaic with the belief that disabled people should be recognized as experts in their own lives and that meaningful support must respect autonomy, communication, identity, preferences, relationships, and individual definitions of quality of life.

Her vision also recognizes that quality and continuity of support are inseparable from workforce sustainability. By creating environments in which Direct Support Professionals are prepared, respected, supported, and valued, NeuroMosaic seeks to strengthen the people providing support while ultimately creating more stable, responsive, and sustainable systems for the disabled people who rely on them.