Judy Singer is an Australian disability rights activist, thinker and writer, specialising in the sociology of the autistic spectrum. She identifies as the 4th of 5 generations of women who are all "somewhere on the autistic spectrum".

She is cited as the first known user of the term "neurodiversity". She is believed to have coined this term between 1996-97 while writing "Odd People In", her Honours Thesis in Disability Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She intended the term to empower people who are neurologically different to claim a space in the political sphere, by locating "neurological difference" as a social category on a par with "gender", "ethnicity", "class", "disability" etc

Her research papers on the autistic spectrum attempted to map out a sociology of the then newly identified neurological disorders, and to view them as a social construct rather than a medical phenomenon.