Meet the Speakers

Laura Bono

Executive Vice President, Children's Health Defense

Laura Bono is Executive Vice President of Children’s Health Defense. Since her son regressed after his vaccinations in the early 1990s and was subsequently diagnosed with heavy metal toxicity and autism, Laura has advocated for services, biomedical treatments, and civil rights for children with autism/vaccine injury in Congress, NIH, CDC, HHS and other governmental agencies. Laura is a co-founder and chairman emeritus of the National Autism Association and was on the board of directors for SafeMinds from 2005-2015. Laura is a member of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Public Interest Partners. She served as a planning committee member and was a speaker for the 2007 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Workshop, “Autism and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities for Research.” She also served as a Community Advisory Board Member for the NIEHS Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI) Study, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) “Study of Health Outcomes in Children with Autism and their Families,” and a collaborative study on Wandering by Johns Hopkins, NIH and autism groups. Laura served as a panel member in the NIH Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) workshop, “Identifying Priorities for Autism Spectrum Disorders Research on Risk Factors” and was a contributing columnist to Autism File Magazine. Her son’s autism story and Laura’s advocacy was chronicled in the book, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic.