Ari Daniel Ne'eman (; born December 10, 1987) is an American disability rights activist and researcher who co-founded the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in 2006. On December 16, 2009, President Barack Obama announced that Ne'eman would be appointed to the National Council on Disability. After an anonymous hold was lifted, Ne'eman was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate to serve on the Council on June 22, 2010. He chaired the council's Policy & Program Evaluation Committee. Ne'eman has a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, which made him the first autistic person to serve on the council. In 2015, Ne'eman left the National Council on Disability at the end of his second term. He currently serves as a consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union. , he also is a Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy at Harvard University. Early life Ne'eman was born to American-Israeli and Israeli parents and raised in Conservative Judaism. Ne'eman grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, where he attended East Brunswick High School. He displayed autistic traits at an early age, and eventually developed an interest in public policy. He engages in stimming, such as pacing and hand-flapping. He also has sensory processing issues that affect his reactions to certain sounds and textures. Early in childhood, Ne'eman was verbally advanced and socially isolated. Like many children on the autism spectrum, he was bullied, and in his early teens he struggled with anxiety and would engage in self-harm by picking his skin. He had to leave the Solomon Schechter Jewish day school around the fifth grade, which distressed him. For a period in high school, Ne'eman went to a segregated special education school. There, he was frustrated by the segregated school because he felt it was a "day care" that focused on "normalizing" disabled students instead of challenging them academically. He said that he and his fellow students "were being written off because of what society expects of people with disabilities." Using his advocacy skills, Ne'eman was eventually able to return to a mainstream school. This experience had a strong effect on Ne'eman's view of the world. He has said that although he himself was successful at returning to a mainstream school, "What is, I think, most frightening to me is that for many students out there that kind of message is absorbed—the idea that they are inferior is absorbed, and that can be very damaging because