After a year of restructuring, the College’s department of
communication sciences will emerge this fall with a sharper
focus, new faculty, and expanded opportunities for students
interested in pursuing degrees in this rewarding field.
Until now, the department has been home to two programs: (1)
communication studies, in which students developed skills in
public speaking and persuasion, with an emphasis on
interpersonal and organizational applications; and (2)
communication sciences and disorders, which prepared
undergraduate and graduate students for careers in
speech-language pathology. In 2003-04, however, a departmental
review held in consultation with an external committee led to
three recommendations that would alter the department’s future.
“We immediately addressed the first two
recommendations—separating the two programs and discontinuing
the communication studies track within the department,” said
acting chair Stephen Haynesworth, who is also an associate dean
and associate professor of biology. “The third recommendation
was to invest in the communications sciences and disorders
track, and build upon our existing strengths in this area. With
this recommendation, we took our time and spent much of the last
year looking for ways to develop a distinctive, niche program
that would attract the best students and researchers.”
The department’s new emphasis, within the field of
communication sciences and disorders, will be biological,
medical, and clinical issues relevant to children. “We already
have built a great reputation for study and research in these
areas,” Haynesworth said. “We have a significant number of
graduates who are already out there, practicing and thriving,
and we have developed longstanding relationships with many of
the local health care facilities whose focus is communication
sciences and disorders.” Haynesworth pointed to the department’s
ongoing collaboration with the Cleveland Hearing & Speech
Center, whose executive director, Bernard Henri, is an adjunct
faculty member in communication sciences.
In addition, Haynesworth sees abundant possibilities for
collaboration between department faculty and faculty from Case’s
school of engineering, the schools of medicine and dental
medicine, the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, and the
Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, as well as from
several departments within Arts and Sciences. The close
proximity of leading health care facilities, including Rainbow
Babies and Children’s Hospital and The Cleveland Clinic,
provides outstanding opportunities for students and faculty
alike.
As a result of the restructuring, the department has added
three new faculty members, including Angela Ciccia, an alumna of
the department’s B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs, who has served
as instructor and clinical program director for the past two
years (see accompanying story). Although the communication
studies track has been discontinued within the department,
Haynesworth said that the College still recognizes the need to
help students enhance their communication skills. “We are
building interdisciplinary programs in this area,” he noted,
citing SAGES as an example. “In SAGES, writing and oral
communication are integrated into the seminar experience.”
NEW APPOINTMENTS IN COMMUNICATION
SCIENCES
Angela
Hein Ciccia (Ph.D., CCC-SLP in Communication Disorders, Case
Western Reserve University) studies how adolescents process
social information. She uses functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) to identify the neuroanatomy involved in such
processing; her subjects include typically developing
adolescents as well as adolescents with traumatic brain injury.
“I became interested in studying adolescents while I was
working as a speechlanguage pathologist at the University of
Texas medical branch,” Ciccia said. “I was assigned to a
pediatric rehabilitation unit and was seeing a lot of teenage
boys who had sustained head injuries from sports, car accidents,
and general risktaking activities. I became frustrated at how
little research was available and applicable to this
population.” She hopes that the restructured department “can
take advantage of the tremendous resources that are available on
this campus, and, by doing so, conduct research that will
ultimately lead to more efficacious treatment strategies.”
Ciccia’s teaching interests are anatomy and physiology,
neuroscience of communication disorders, adult language
disorders, and motor speech disorders. She is the faculty
advisor for the Case chapter of the National Student
Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the undergraduate
advisor for communication sciences majors.
Patrizia
Bonaventura (Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science, The Ohio
State University) conducts research on speech production,
perception, and recognition, with the goal of developing new
technologies for people with hearing and speech disabilities. At
Case, she will establish a speech production lab equipped with
an electromagnetic device that measures, graphs, and visualizes
movements of the speech organs.
Currently, Bonaventura is working on an automatic speech
recognizer that processes both auditory cues (the sounds of
speech) and articulatory cues (as in lip reading); most speech
recognizers are “trained” to respond to acoustic signals only.
She is also collaborating with audiologists at the Cleveland
Hearing & Speech Center to improve speech interpreting devices
for the deaf. Her teaching interests include helping students
apply speech science to the improvement of speech technology—an
especially promising career field for graduates in communication
sciences.
Stacy
L. Williams (Ph.D., CCC-SLP in Communication Sciences and
Disorders, University of Cincinnati) began her career as a
speech-language pathologist, creating and customizing software
programs for the children she served. Her areas of expertise
include augmentative communication, instructional technology,
and distance education, all linked to children’s speech-language
development and disorders.
At present, Williams’s primary research objective is to
investigate uses of virtual reality simulations for subjects
with a variety of speech-language disorders. “Case has an
outstanding reputation for development and implementation of
innovative technology-based applications,” she said. “It is my
hope that the newly expanded communication sciences department,
applying technological tools and medical advances, will research
new and cutting-edge ideas for integrating technology into the
field of speechlanguage pathology.”
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