Tristan Mahr, a second-year master's student in the Speech-Language Pathology program in the Department of Communicative Disorders, was one of just 10 students across the country to receive a Students Preparing for Academic and Research Careers Award from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association.
The SPARC Award is given to students pursuing Ph.D. educations in communication sciences and disorders. Its goal is to encourage students to pursue careers in academia, which in turn will help fill faculty and research positions in the discipline.
Mahr's research interests include speech-sound discrimination in children with autism spectrum disorders and using eye-tracking technology to study early language development. He performs statistical and acoustic analysis for the Learning To Talk project, a research collaboration among investigators at University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota and Ohio State University.