Alejandro Rodriguez, Former Director of Child Psychiatry, Dies at 93

Alejandro Rodriguez, associate professor emeritus of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a skillful and creative physician who conducted pivotal studies on autism and developmental disorders, died Jan. 20 of heart failure complications in Palm City, Fla.
Rodriguez trained in the 1950s, when child psychiatry was still a young discipline. He studied under and later worked alongside some of the field’s giants. Rodriguez’s mentor at Johns Hopkins was the venerable Leo Kanner, the founding father of the discipline, who coined the term autism. Later, Rodriguez and Kanner collaborated on several seminal autism studies. One of them was a 30-year follow-up of the original 11 children diagnosed at Johns Hopkins with autism and described the long-term outcomes of the disorder in children as they age.