Our founder Dame Stephanie Shirley CH celebrates her 90th birthday today.
Dame Stephanie has had an incredible life. She came to the UK from Germany in the war as a child refugee with nothing, and went on to found a tech company as a woman in the seventies which made her one of the wealthiest women in the UK. Then she gave most of that wealth away.
Her charities
Dame Stephanie had a son called Giles who was autistic and had epilepsy. All of her philanthropic work stems from a desire to make the world better for autistic people and families like hers.
Dame Stephanie set up two other autism charities before Autistica; Priors Court - a school, and Autism at Kingwood - supported living. Realising the need for research to change the future for autistic people, she founded Autistica in 2004, the UK's first national autism research charity.
I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving
Dame Stephanie Shirley CH
We know Dame Stephanie as 'Steve' - the masculine nickname she used in the seventies in order to be taken seriously in a man's world.
We are so proud to have such a driven and inspiring founder, who continues to to inspire us and so many others to this day.