PhD Student, Christa Akers, Awarded Prestigious NIH Travel Award

Christa Akers, a Ph.D. student in Communication Sciences and Disorders, has been awarded a National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Student Travel Fellowship for the NIDCD Research Symposium in Clinical Aphasiology (RSCA). She received the award as the first author of the submission “Using Complete Utterances to Measure Change in Conversational Discourse Following Conversation-Based Group Treatment”, co-authored by Mary Boyle and Roberta J. Elman. This very competitive award supports attendance of 15 students at the RSCA and the associated Clinical Aphasiology Conference. The RSCA provides a number of special opportunities for student fellows, including pairing with a host mentor for the conference, a luncheon at which the student fellows interact with the RSCA keynote speakers, a poster session at which the fellows present and discuss their research, and a mentoring breakfast at which the fellows interact with seasoned Clinical Aphasiology Conference investigators. The award will support Christa’s travel and registration for this year’s conference to be held May 26, 2020 to May 30, 2020 on the Kohala Coast of the Island of Hawaii