The ASHA Leader - February 2015 - (Page 55)

Sometimes, clients themselves help turn on lights in dimly lit corners of communication sciences and disorders practice, sparking powerful collaborations that boost teaching and training in areas where some have less experience. Case in point: the 2014 launch of the Michael and Tami Lang Stuttering Institute in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. The benefactor? A life-long stutterer who's giving $3.2 million to help those like him. The CSD professional? A passionate associate professor who's determined to raise awareness and increase clinical training and research in stuttering. The result? A potent center of translational research and the first nonprofit stuttering institute affiliated within a university. Treatment for adults and children is free. Yes, you heard that right. With the establishment of the Lang Stuttering Institute at UT, Michael S. Lang's long journey with stuttering has come full circle. An untreated undergraduate there in the 1960s, he wrestled with the anxiety and loneliness so familiar to disfluent college students: too embarrassed to ask someone out on a date; constantly struggling to reach out to others; repeatedly skipping classes to avoid being called on by professors. When it came time to rush a fraternity, "I was not exactly the number one rushee," he remembers. "I couldn't say a word." The neeD ... AnD A SeeD Nevertheless, the native of Fort Worth made friends and persevered. After earning a law degree at UT, Lang embarked on a successful career in law and finance. Among many other accomplishments, he founded seven companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Throughout those many years of enterprise and growth, the disfluency remained. He recalls in an interview even being afraid to read to his grandson, worried that the boy would learn to stutter from him. And then, the time came to transform that challenge into an opportunity to give back. "To me, it's a crime that there are children and adults who stutter but cannot find or pay for effective treatment," Lang announced. He and his wife, Tami, sought to endow an institute to do just that. Enter Courtney Byrd, an associate professor in UT's department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and director of a program that became endowed as the Bodner Developmental Stuttering Laboratory in 2012. An energetic teacher and dedicated researcher, Byrd has made it her mission, as she tells it, "to train our students in a way that inspires them to train others so that we will be able to make a meaningful contribution to our understanding and treatment of stuttering." Working with hundreds of clients over the years in the Bodner Laboratory supported that first objective. Byrd, however, never stopped seeking even more opportunities to bring CSD students together with disfluent children and adults in clinical settings to improve understanding and treatment of the onset, development and maintenance of stuttering. She sees a great need for CSD students, especially undergraduates, to encounter disfluency in real-life clinical settings as early as possible in their careers. Respondents to a 2014 survey of more than When it came time to rush a fraternity, "I was not exactly the number one rushee," Lang remembers. "I couldn't say a word." le ader .pubs. asha .org 55 http://leader.pubs.asha.org

The ASHA Leader - February 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ASHA Leader - February 2015