A new researcher Dr. Lisa Sullivan, currently a postdoc at the University of Manitoba, will be joining my lab this fall!  She will be supported by a Canadian fellowship for two years to work on a project about prevelar raising/merger (pronouncing words like bag and leg more like vague). The project would extend her dissertation work -- and my own "bag-beg-bagel" prevelar merger studies -- to map the phenomenon across North America, collect massive numbers of audio recordings and perceptions online, and provide public education about dialect differences and linguistic discrimination, all in one interactive website or app. Lisa has a background in web development and experience incorporating writing practice into curriculum development, as well as her degrees in linguistics. We'll be lucky to have her!

I participated in ASHA's Lessons for Success program, a three-day intensive grant-prep workshop.  Their Pathways program was similar a few years ago, with a focus on writing your first grant. LfS focuses on the grant-review process, including mock reviews of participants' past unfunded grants - very useful experience! I also enjoyed getting to know my colleague Roha Kaipa better, as we flew together and got rerouted to avoid storms coming back. 

Funding has been renewed for a computer science student to work on my Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project. The OSU College of Arts and Sciences' Advancing Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (AURCA) program funds work-study for research projects. My student will build a public database of searchable video clips from my interviews with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

The Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project has received a College of Arts and Sciences Community Engagement Grant! It will support the expansion of our video collection to include interviews with people with adult-onset hearing loss, milder levels of hearing loss, family members and related support professionals. I will again offer my honors course for sign language and CSD students to work on the project all year long. This has been a great way for busy clinical and social science students to get hands-on experience with all stages of a big project, and the project would be almost nowhere without them.

The DXDX project is growing!  I was just awarded a Community Engagement Grant to support expanding the project to include deaf teens/tweens and their parents during next school year. We'll collect interviews with kids and families in partnership with the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, which uses American Sign Language, and Hearts for Hearing, which provides speech and hearing therapy to kids who use speech. We'll also work on tagging clips from the interviews to showcase the wide variety of real-life stories on our new website: dxdx.okstate.edu

I have submitted a proposal for a New Investigators Research Grant, which supports one-year projects for junior faculty.  This project focuses on conversations among young adults with cochlear implants and how listeners react to them.

I have been awarded a seed grant from the OSU College of Arts & Sciences!  This will support a grad student for a year and allow us to begin building a video collection of interviews among people with early hearing loss about their social and linguistic experiences.  This collection will ultimately become a public resource for parents and educators to provide personal stories about the real-life effects of the early decisions they have to make about hearing devices, communication modes, and schooling options for kids with hearing loss.  

This week, I participated in the ASHA Pathways workshop in Washington, DC.  Pathways is a professional development program that pairs established mentors with early-career researchers for a year of research/grant-writing mentoring, and they couldn't have made a better match for me.  My mentor and I really hit it off, and she works in exactly the areas I'm moving toward, quality-of-life issues for people with hearing loss.  It was a great opportunity to improve my research plans and meet fellow researchers in related areas.

After months of arrangements, the department's new ultrasound system is up and running!  Funded by the Student Tech Fee grant I wrote in the fall, the system includes audio recording and a new laptop to run the software.  Training for clinical use will begin in summer.