Kimberly Dahl receives a Whiting Foundation fellowship 🎉

Dr Kimberly Dahl, lab director, has been awarded a Fellowship for Higher Education by the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation. The fellowship will fund immersive study at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Under the guidance of Dr Rene Utianski—a leading clinician-scientist and chair of the Division of Speech Pathology—Kim will be embedded within Mayo’s premier Behavioral Neurology and Speech Pathology clinics. This experience offers a unique opportunity to observe interdisciplinary evaluations and advanced treatments for complex, neurodegenerative motor speech disorders.

The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation awards fellowships to college or university educators in New England “to stimulate and broaden the minds of teachers.” The foundation supports travel to domestic and international locations, with the goal of enhancing the quality of instruction. Kim will use her experience at Mayo to develop course materials that are grounded in state-of-the-art, evidence-based practice. Her goal is to help future speech-language pathologists specializing in motor speech disorders to bridge theory and practice, navigate diagnostic ambiguity, hone their clinical reasoning skills, and prepare for interprofessional practice.

Kim is grateful to the Whiting Foundation, Dr Utianski and the Mayo Clinic, and Emerson College’s Office of Research and Creative Scholarship for helping to fund and carry out this project.