The Research Symposium in Communication Sciences and Disorders supports a full day of presentations by leading scientists in areas that are having transformational effects in the communication sciences and disorders (CSD) discipline. The Research Symposium is held at the annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and is open to all of the approximately 15,000 Convention attendees, which includes students, practitioners, and researchers. Following Convention, the Symposium content is widely disseminated through audio recordings of the presentations, which are synced with the slides and transcribed, and by making them freely accessible on the ASHA website. Additionally, each presenter submits an article based on their presentation to the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research to be published in the annual Research Symposium Forum. An innovation that will be implemented in this current funding cycle is that ASHA will make these articles freely accessible upon publication on the ASHA Journals website and will deposit them in PubMed Central without embargo.
The first aim of the Research Symposium grant is to advance scientific discourse and dissemination of scientific discovery and innovation on five topics that are having transformational effects across several subareas in CSD. This will be accomplished, in part, by making the Research Symposium Forum open access and by widely promoting both the recorded and the written content across ASHA?s many communication channels. Over the next 5-year funding cycle, the Symposium will address five topics that cut across the areas of hearing, speech, language, and other aspects of cognition, including (1) Health and Healthcare Equity of People With Communication Disabilities, (2) Bilingualism, (3) Artificial Intelligence in CSD, (4) Genetics in CSD, and (5) Intervention and Implementation Clinical Trials in CSD.
The second aim of the Research Symposium grant is to advance the research career development of early- career scientists focused on research in CSD. Between 2021 and 2025, the Research Mentoring- Pair Travel Award and ASHA?s in-kind contribution will provide funding to attend the Symposium and mentoring support to 130 early-career scientists in CSD. The Travel Award recipients will attend the Symposium along with a mentor and engage in mentored research activities before, during, and after each Symposium. These activities are designed to help integrate the protgs into their scientific community and encourage them to pursue a research career and become productive scholars. The scientific base of the CSD discipline will be strengthened by these scientific dissemination, research education, and mentoring activities.
The Research Symposium in Communication Sciences and Disorders aims to strengthen the scientific base and increase the research capacity of the discipline, which will lead to improvements in the communication health of millions people with communication or related disorders. The Symposium presentations will advance the scientific dialogue and be broadly disseminated through freely available peer-reviewed publications and transcribed recordings. The associated Travel Award will provide funds to support 130 promising early-career scientists in attending the Research Symposium and engaging in mentored research activities before, during, after the Symposium to increase their recruitment and retention in a research career.
| Van Daele, Douglas J (2010) Quantitative PCR analysis of laryngeal muscle fiber types. J Commun Disord 43:327-34 |
