CHS Professor Receives American Speech-Language-Hearing Association AARC Award

Published July 21, 2023                                                                                                                                          By Darlene Muguiro                                                                                                                                        UTEP College of Health Sciences

Dr. Brandon Merritt, assistant professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and director of the Projection of Identity (PRIDE) Laboratory, has been named a recipient of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA) 2023 Advancing Academic-Research Careers (AARC) award. Merritt is one of 11 recipients of this nationally competitive award. He will be formally recognized at the upcoming ASHA convention in November.

The AARC program is designed to develop and retain early-career faculty who are in the pre-tenure period. As an awardee, Merritt will participate in an 18-month mentorship program, where he will receive one-on-one guidance from established ASHA mentors in both teaching and research. He has identified Dr. Susannah Levi (New York University) as his teaching mentor and Dr. Benjamin Munson (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) as his research mentor. Merritt plans to use part of his $5,000 stipend from the award to visit Munson’s lab this fall, where he will be trained on speech acoustics.

“Our plan is to write a manuscript based on a database that I have at the PRIDE Lab of speakers of different gender identities, looking at how individuals code their identity in their speech,” he said. “We can also incorporate what we’re learning into the speech therapy training component of BLOOM, the laboratory’s outreach program that supports transgender individuals in our community.”

Merritt says that he plans to work with Susannah Levi to develop teaching modules that incorporate gender diversity into speech science, which could be used by faculty and staff at universities across the nation. He also plans to attend the ASHA conference in 2024 with Levi to present their modules.

“At this point, most of what we know about speech is based off this idea of ‘man and woman,’ and that’s really the only distinction,” he said.

Merritt says that the news of being selected, which comes just shy of his one-year anniversary at UTEP, was a pleasant surprise, given the competitive nature of the award.

“I was very pleased and happy to have the support of people who value the work I’m doing and see the potential in it.”

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Go Miners!

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