Students win bowl competition, faculty honored at state speech-hearing conference

By Kate Hunger

 

A trio of speech-language pathology students won first place in an academic bowl during the Texas Speech-Language Hearing Association (TSHA) annual convention in Fort Worth.

Second-year master’s students Madelynn Patzer, Jadea Hill and Hannah Jackson competed in a multi-round Praxis Bowl competition among Texas universities. Teams answered timed practice questions for the Praxis Examination in Speech-Language Pathology, the standardized exam required for certification.

“I have been preparing for my Praxis exam since January for a few hours each day, so I was excited to put my knowledge to the test with this event,” Hill said. “We all worked well together, and it definitely paid off.”

Fang-Ling Lu, PhD, CCC-SLP, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, presented the poster “Intensive training of respiratory-phonatory coordination and prosodic control for ataxic-dominant mixed dysarthria” along with students Hannah Jackson and Shelby Kraemer.

“I really enjoyed presenting the information to the other guests at TSHA, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work on such a unique case,” Jackson said.

Faculty and students also served in numerous service roles during the conference:

– Assistant Professor and Director of Clinical Education Angela Kennedy, SLP-D, CCC-SLP, serves as TSHA’s vice president of academic and scientific affairs. She was the convention’s program chair and organized its education, exhibitor and career development components.

– Assistant Professor Casey Taliancich-Klinger, PhD, CCC-SLP, served as co-chair for TSHA’s scholarship and volunteer committee.

– First-year speech-language pathology student Haley Hood serves as a member of the TSHA Medical Committee. In her role at the conference, she spoke with hundreds of people about the transition to medical speech-language pathology.

During the conference, the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (TSHF) awarded Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Taliancich-Klinger a 2022 Burtis-Vogel/Elkins Community Service Award from the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (TSHF) during the conference. TSHF also awarded Assistant Professor Rocío Norman,  PhD, CCC-SLP, a Past Presidents Award in support of her ongoing research to better understand the underlying cognitive mechanisms of language comprehension in people with mild traumatic brain injury. 

The opportunity to attend TSHA in person was special, Patzner said.

“To me, it’s so important to engage with others who have a common interest and that you can learn from, and TSHA provided that for me,” she said.