Clinician, researcher, advocate.
"Understanding how your mind works is not the end of the journey — it is the beginning."
Dr. Nilija Fulambarkar, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist with over a decade of experience spanning research, assessment, and therapy across the full lifespan. She founded Insight Psychological Assessment & Therapy to bring rigorous, compassionate, and neurodiversity-affirming psychological evaluation to children, adolescents, and adults throughout the Bay Area.
Dr. Fulambarkar's clinical roots run deep. She spent over six years as a Neuropsychological Assessor at Stanford University School of Medicine, contributing to cutting-edge research on the behavioral and neuropathological underpinnings of autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and genetic conditions including Fragile X syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome. This work — funded by NIMH, NICHD, the National Fragile X Foundation, and the Simons Foundation — gave her an unusually rigorous foundation in the neuroscience underlying the conditions she now assesses clinically.
Her early clinical training at the Autism Center of Northern California (ACNC) — the same multidisciplinary assessment center she now serves as a Clinical Assessment Supervisor — gave her hands-on expertise in gold-standard neurodevelopmental assessment using the ADOS-2, WISC, WPPSI, WASI, and Vineland III. She has assessed hundreds of individuals for Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, learning disorders, and other developmental disabilities, and she has long understood that a diagnosis is only as useful as the recommendations it generates for real life.
Following her doctoral internship at CHAC and her postdoctoral fellowship at Kaiser Permanente — where she was subsequently hired as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist — Dr. Fulambarkar developed deep expertise in mood and anxiety disorders, trauma-informed care, and personality assessment for adult populations. Her therapy training includes extensive work at the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford, where she provided psychotherapy for families of chronically and terminally ill children using a Family Systems framework.
Dr. Fulambarkar holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Palo Alto University, a Master of Science in Clinical Psychology, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Drexel University — a scientific background that informs both the rigor and depth she brings to every evaluation. She is multilingual, conducting sessions in English, Marathi, Hindi, and Spanish, and brings cultural humility and sensitivity to her work with diverse client populations across the Bay Area.
She is a member of the Psychology Honor Society and has published peer-reviewed research in collaboration with Stanford and Temple University. Her founding of Insight Psychological Assessment & Therapy reflects a deeply held belief: that every individual deserves access to thorough, compassionate assessment — and that understanding how your mind works can be genuinely life-changing.