Two faculty members from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences have been recognized with annual awards from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), VUMC’s credentialing organization.

Anne Marie Tharpe, PhD, might not have become a worldwide authority on pediatric hearing loss if she hadn’t been looking for something to do during study hall in her high school years in Memphis. One day, she and a friend volunteered to work in a classroom with deaf children.

Children with hearing loss who use remote microphone systems (RMS) at home have access to about 42 percent more words each day, providing a critical boost to vocabulary and language learning, a Vanderbilt study has found.

Two faculty members of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center are receiving awards from the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) this year, representing two of eight total recipients nationwide.

A telemedicine initiative in Vanderbilt’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences is working to make follow-up hearing tests for newborns more accessible in rural areas of Tennessee, while teaching young pediatric audiology and pediatric speech language pathology students to treat patients remotely.