Background
Jennifer Lynn Cook was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in West Caldwell, New Jersey, the only child of Joseph and Jane Cook.
Jennifer Lynn Cook was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in West Caldwell, New Jersey, the only child of Joseph and Jane Cook.
Brown University.
She is known for her Asperkids series of books and Speaking Geek multimedia series, aimed at educating people from the perspective of someone with Asperger syndrome. O'Toole is a featured contributor to Dr. Tony Atwood's Top Aspie Mentors: Been There, Done That, Autism & Learning Differences, and wrote the foreword to Easy to Love, Hard to Live With. Her father was an international commercial litigator (d2007).
Her mother served as the only woman on their town council for 12 years. O'Toole attended Brown University, where she majored in American Civilization, graduating with honors in 1997. She was hired as a counselor in the Domestic Violence Unit of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in Charlotte, NC. In this capacity, she trained officers, led student-focused presentations in colleges and high schools, and served as a victim advocate.
In 1999, O'Toole began Master's work at the Graduate School of Social Work at Columbia University in New York City. After Columbia, she enrolled at the Graduate School of Education at Queens University of Charlotte, while teaching language arts at both the middle school and high school levels. In her first term, she garnered a student-initiated nomination for Disney's American Teacher of the Year Award.
She and her family live near Charlotte, North Carolina. Outstanding Literary Work of the Year, Autism Society of America, 2014.
Outstanding Literary Work of the Year, Autism Society of America, 2014 50 Most Influential Women in North Carolina, 2014 25 Most Amazing Autistic Women, Autistic Spectrum Digest, August 2014 Temple Grandin Award for Outstanding Global Contributions, Future Horizons GRASP Distinguished Spectrumite AuKids Speaker of the Year Leading Woman, The Kappa Alpha Theta Leading Women Award (2013) Disney's Babble: Top 30 Autism Spectrum Blogs 2013 Disney's Babble: Top 30 Autism Facebook Fan Pages 2013 Disney's Babble: Top 30 Autism Websites Godiva’s Woman of the Year, Nominee.
O'Toole began dance at age two, a lifelong passion, which she continued through college, at age seven, she became a member of Mensa.
