In September 2021, Temple Grandin made history again when her sculpture was dedicated at Colorado State University as the first one to honor a woman on the campus and one of the few in the world to honor an autistic woman.
Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, animal behavior expert, innovator, livestock industry consultant, author, and autism activist.
Grandin was born in 1947 and grew up in a wealthy family in Boston, Massachusetts, the oldest of four children. Her mother, Anna, noticed Grandin’s slow behavior development and consulted doctors who diagnosed Grandin with “brain damage” caused by an insufficient bond with her mother. Anna refused to institutionalize Grandin and supported her with a speech therapist and governess. After several years Grandin started attending school with some support and accommodations. Her adolescent years were challenging due to her parents’ divorce and social challenges at school. At 14, she started attending a boarding school in New Hampshire. The small farm they had was her first encounter with agriculture. A year later, she spent the summer on her aunt’s ranch in Arizona and fell in love with the culture of the West and cattle.
After graduating high school in 1966, Grandin earned her bachelor’s degree in human psychology from Franklin Pierce College (1970), master’s degree in animal science from Arizona State University (1975), and doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1989). Then, she became faculty in Colorado State University, teaching, researching, and inspiring students.
Since the 70s, she has worked as a consultant in the meat and livestock industry, saying that at the beginning, it was harder to prove herself as a woman than an autistic person.
Grandin published several books about autism, writing about her experience and recommending methods that helped her. She is a public speaker about the subject and an advocate for autism rights.
CSU alumnus Jeff Tovar commissioned the life-size bronze sculpture, and the artist David Anderson created it depicting Grandin sitting on the ground and looking at the horizon.
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