Board of Directors

Richard Spurling, President & Founder
Richard was born in Sweden and grew up in England and Belgium.  He attended Florida Atlantic University where he played Division I tennis.  For the past ten years he has been teaching and managing tennis programs in Florida, Boston and Cape Cod.  Richard earned his MBA from Babson College where he focused on entrepreneurship.  Richard and his family live in Los Angeles CA where he has expanded ACEing Autism.  He is married to Shafali Jeste and they have two young boys, Nischal and Kiran.

 

Shafali Spurling Jeste, Co-Founder
Shafali grew up in La Jolla, California where she enjoyed playing tennis for her high school team. She earned a BA in philosophy at Yale and then earned her MD from Harvard Medical School. Her interest in child behavior led her to pursue a career in behavioral child neurology, with a focus on developmental disorders such as autism.  Her research, funded by NIH, is focused on understanding the brain basis for autism and on identifying early markers of autism in infants. After completing her training at Children's Hospital, Boston, she now works at UCLA and has continued to work in the Center for Autism Research and Treatment.  She designed ACEing Autism with her husband, Richard Spurling, after seeing first hand the tremendous need for adequate recreational services and resources for children with autism.  She is enthusiastic about continuing to expand this successful program in the Los Angeles area!

 

Vanessa Vogel-Farley, Treasurer and Director of Operations 
Vanessa grew up on a family dairy farm in rural Wisconsin; she then went on to college at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she studied Chemistry, Biology and French.  She joined Dr. Charles Nelson's research lab during her last year of undergraduate studies after completing a directed research project at the Center for Neurobehavioral Development. This experience got her interested in the processes associated with brain development during the neonatal period into adolescence and that factors that can affect normal development. Currently, she is the Clinical Research Coordinator for the Division of Developmental Medicine Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Children’s Hospital Boston, where she has the amazing opportunity to work on Dr. Nelson's collaborations with scientists from MIT and Harvard examining several clinical populations, including autism.  

 

Charlotte (Ellie) Reece, Secretary and Volunteer Recruitment
Ellie grew up on a farm in the Midwest town of Columbia, MO where her mother ran a large Therapeutic Riding Program for adults and kids.  She was active in tennis throughout her youth and played all four years of high school.  After her family moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where she finished high school, she attended the University of Richmond where she received a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Business Administration. Ellie began working at Children's Hospital Boston in the Neurology Foundation in 2004 and received her Masters of Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine in 2007.  She is currently the Practice Administrator for the Neurology Foundation at Children's Hospital Boston.

 

Mira Tamir Spiegel, Program Development
Mira brings a parent perspective to ACEing Autism. As the mother of a daughter with autism, she understands the challenges associated with finding quality recreational programs that can bring out the best in children on the autism spectrum. A lifelong tennis enthusiast, Mira played tennis and squash competitively in college for Tufts University and spent many summers teaching tennis to children through the Park & Recreation Commission in her hometown of Needham, MA. She has an MBA from the Roberto C. Goizueta Business School at Emory University and is currently a Senior Director of Marketing Research for Imagitas, a Pitney Bowes Company. Mira and her husband, Rob, live in Needham with their two young children, Zoe and Aaron.

 

Lee Mavros Rushton, Volunteer Coordinator
Lee grew up in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and played tennis on her high school team. She moved to Boston in 1998 to attend Boston University, where she earned her B.A. in Psychology.  She recently earned her Masters in Counseling Psychology from Framingham State College. She is the Project Coordinator for the Simons Initiative on Autism and the Brain at MIT, where she organizes recruitment, assessment of potential participants, and helps conduct testing of subjects, among other things.  Lee came to the SIAB from working in the direct service field providing therapy and training to children with autism and their families and schools.  She was trained in ABA at the New England Center for Children and worked to perfect these skills and others in behavior-based and child-centered domains (ie Floortime, Verbal Behavior, Discrete Trial Training, etc) at Educational Consultants of New England (now Milestones, Inc.).

 

Peter Kotsifas, Accounting
Peter attended the University of Massachusetts, Lowell earning a B.S in Accounting.   Having grown up with a passion for golf, Peter spent more than 15 years in the golf industry where he held roles as controller and general manager at leading Massachusetts country clubs overseeing golf and tennis programs as well as operations and financial functions.  Also having earned his PGA card, he particularly enjoyed teaching youth the game of golf.  Peter currently leads the accounting department at a Boston health care consulting firm, has completed the CPA examination process and is pursuing his MBA at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  In addition to supporting ACEing Autism in a business capacity, Peter is also a teaching volunteer.