Elucidating the heterogeneous etiologies of autism will require investment in comprehensive longitudinal data acquisition from large community based cohorts. With this in mind, we have established a hospital-university-based (HUB) database of autism which incorporates prospective and retrospective data from a large and ethnically diverse population. The collected data includes social-demographic characteristics, standardized behavioral testing, detailed clinical history from electronic patient records, genetic samples, and various neurological measures. We describe the initial cohort characteristics following the first 18 months of data collection (188 children with autism). We believe that the Negev HUB autism database offers a unique and valuable resource for studying the heterogeneity of autism etiologies across different ethnic populations.