Allison Schaser and Laura Grant, Ph.D. students in the UW-Madison Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, have been awarded New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarships from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation.
These scholarships support strong doctoral candidates who will commit to attaining the research doctoral degree and to working in a higher education academic community in the field of communication sciences and disorders in the United States.
Schaser is in her fifth year of the doctoral program and works in Associate Professor Nadine Connor's lab. Schaser is focusing on voice and swallowing research, particularly in an aging and disease model. Her current project seeks to determine the effect of age and exercise on neurotrophic factors in the brainstem nuclei and muscles involved in both voice and swallowing.
Grant, who works in Assistant Professor Michelle Ciucci's lab, is in her third year of the Ph.D. program. Her work focuses on characterizing the neural mechanisms underlying voice and swallowing deficits in Parkinson disease, as well as those underlying therapy-induced changes. Specifically, she is interested in the role of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that, like dopamine, is drastically depleted in Parkinson disease.