Rising Star Award
ABOUT THE RISING STAR AWARD
WHO IS ELIGIBLE
Ph.D. students in Communication Sciences and Disorders and related fields with
• under-represented identities or perspectives, and/or
• research interests in diversity-related issues in communication sciences and disorders.
AWARD
Awardee (one per year) will receive a $1,000 award and will be invited to deliver an invited lecture at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on the topic of their research on October 23, 2024. All awardee travel and lodging expenses will be covered.
TO APPLY
Applicants should submit their current CV and a description of their research background and current research activity (1 page). Applicants should email their materials to Robin Jones (robin.m.jones@vumc.org). Application materials are due by August 3, 2024. The announcement of the awardee will occur on or before August 23, 2024.
To see the flyer, click here
2023 Rising Star Award Recipient
Congratulations to Kristina Bowdrie on winning the 2023 Rising Star Award!
Kristina Bowdrie is a graduate student at The Ohio State University. She recently graduated with her Doctor of Audiology degree in May of 2023 and is currently working towards completing her PhD. She works as an audiologist at The VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System, where she is also completing a fellowship on quality improvement in healthcare. Her interests include examining important clinic outcomes in vulnerable patient populations and assessing the implementation and effectiveness of evidence-based interventions in audiology.
2023 Rising Star Honorable Mention Awardees
Elizabeth Evans is a PhD student in the Rehabilitation Sciences program at the University of Florida in the Communication Equity and Outcomes Lab within the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences department. She is a Neuromuscular Plasticity T32 and McKnight pre-doctoral fellow. Her interests include health disparities in rehabilitation outcomes. She is particularly interested in how cumulative life stress influences stroke and post-stroke conditions such as aphasia.
Shauntelle Cannon is a doctoral student at The Ohio State University and received her Clinical Doctorate of Audiology in 2017 from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include auditory and vestibular contributions to gait biomechanics, vestibular perception, and aging. She is recipient of the NIA Diversity Supplement Award as part of a parent R01 investigating the associations between age-related changes in vestibular perception, balance, and fall risk.
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2022 Rising Star Award Recipient
Congratulations to Mariah Morton on winning the 2022 Rising Star Award!
Mariah Morton is a speech-language pathologist, specializing in the assessment and treatment of voice and upper airway disorders, and she currently works part time at the UAB Voice Center. She is a third year PhD candidate in the School of Kinesiology at Auburn University being co-advised by the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. Her research interests include the intersection between exercise physiology and vocal function as well as healthcare disparities for racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people as well as rural-living individuals in need for SLP-specific voice care. Ms. Morton’s research has been published in The Laryngoscope.
2022 Rising Star Honorable Mention Awardees
Arynn Byrd is a PhD candidate in the Hearing and Speech Sciences Program at the University of Maryland-College Park (UMD-CP). Her research interests include African American English, sentence processing, and the educational outcomes of students who speak non-mainstream dialects. Byrd currently serves as an ASHA S.T.E.P mentor and the Early Career Professional on the ASHA Government and Public Policy Board. She has published in the Journal of Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Diana Lucía Abarca is a doctoral student in Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University and practicing early intervention speech language pathologist in Tallahassee, Florida. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Central Florida. Diana uses funds of knowledge, family-centered, and culturally sustaining frameworks to understand the knowledge, skills, values, priorities, and beliefs that minoritized families bring with them when involved in early intervention. She aims to develop and evaluate equitable early intervention practices that pre-service and practicing early interventionists can use to sustain the culture of minoritized families with children with disabilities. Ms. Abarca has been published in several journals including the International Public Health Journal.
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2021 Rising Star Award Recipient
Congratulations to Kimberly Crespo on winning the first Rising Star Award (2021)!
Kimberly Crespo is an F31 Predoctoral Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in Rita Kaushanskaya’s Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.A. in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences from Kean University in Union, New Jersey.
2021 Rising Star Honorable Mention Awardees
Jasenia Hartman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). Her research interests include language processing, audiovisual integration, and cochlear implants. Hartman’s dissertation is at the intersection of auditory prosthetic research and developmental psychology. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Science and Madison Graduate Research Scholarship. She also received the NIH-NIDCD Diversity Supplement Award, as part of a parent R01 grant aimed at improving speech outcomes in CI users.
Brandon Merritt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Indiana University. His research focuses on gender expression and perception through voice and speech, particularly from gender-diverse speakers. He has published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups.