Speech Researcher Earns Prestigious NIH F31 Award

During her four years as a speech therapist, Kate Kreidler MS'21 always felt drawn back to research and academia. With four years of her doctoral program now behind her, she has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to further her career ambitions.

Kreidler, a PhD candidate in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing at The University of Texas at Dallas, received an Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to continue her study of rhythmic deficits in children with developmental language disorder (DLD).

The award, known as an F31 grant, helps promising doctoral students become productive, independent research scientists by providing access to mentored research training during the student's dissertation process.

"My long-term goal is to obtain a tenure-track position, and this grant provides wonderful exposure to the NIH's inner workings - things a principal investigator has to learn," she said. "There's so much that I'll be able to experience earlier thanks to this opportunity."

When Kreidler first entered the State University of New York College at Geneseo in 2009, she said she gravitated to speech pathology because there was job security in the field.

"But during my second semester in the program, I learned more about becoming a scientist and studying language, which I have always loved," she said.

In pursuit of a research career, Kreidler sought out undergraduate training opportunities, and that strong clinical background facilitated her acceptance into a master's program at Purdue University, she said, where she studied how young children who stutter process words' meanings.

"My long-term goal is to obtain a tenure-track position, and this grant provides wonderful exposure to the NIH's inner workings - things a principal investigator has to learn. There's so much that I'll be able to experience earlier thanks to this opportunity."

Kate Kreidler MS'21

"There, I started taking classes with Dr. Lisa Goffman [professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at Purdue at the time] and became very interested in early child language development," Kreidler said. "That guided my clinical choices."

After completing her master's degree in speech-language pathology, Kreidler entered the workforce in 2015 as a pediatric speech therapist.

"I felt steadily pulled back to research - specifically, to Dr. Goffman's studies at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology and development," she said, "As I worked with families with young children, I wondered, 'How can we use children's gesture development to predict later language development?'"

In 2019, Kreidler followed Goffman to UTD and began her PhD work in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), where Goffman was the Nelle C. Johnston Chair in Communication Disorders in Children. She has earned a second master's degree along the way, but before her first year was over, Kreidler hit the same roadblock as many scientists worldwide.

"I had planned an experimental study about how toddlers learn to communicate through gestures," she said. "When the COVID pandemic hit, I was unable to collect data on that. I had to find existing data from another project to analyze."

Goffman had a longitudinal dataset comparing rhythmic production in children who have DLD with that of typically developing children. Kreidler's analysis revealed that DLD is associated with a deficit in rhythmic grouping abilities when drumming a simple pattern.

"Through this project, Kate became captivated by how music and language rhythms develop in children with developmental language disorder," said Goffman, who is now a senior scientist and endowed chair at the Center for Childhood Deafness, Language, and Learning at the Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska. "She, along with Dr. Janet Vuolo [at Ohio State University] and myself, published a research paper that served as the springboard for her dissertation research, which was selected for this fellowship."

DLD affects about 7% of children. It is marked by a struggle with language, specifically grammar, but also shows co-occurring deficits in other areas, like music and prosody - the cadences and rhythms of speech.

"I hope to learn if slightly older children, 7- and 8-year-olds, have deficits around rhythmic organization with both music and speech," said Kreidler, who is a Eugene McDermott Graduate Fellow. "In this work I will measure mouth and hand motion while children learn speech and music rhythms. Our long-term aim is to develop better diagnostic and intervention practices."

Kreidler said she is happier as a researcher, driven by her love of science and its process.

"In a PhD program, the goal is to develop your own research program and your own questions," she said. "That creativity - being able to work toward that as my career path - was probably the biggest motivation I had to return to school."

Kreidler described the F31 grant-writing experience as a crucial part of her training and expressed gratitude for the support of Dr. Adrianna Shembel, her UTD mentor, along with the school's leaders, including speech, language, and hearing department head Dr. Colleen Le Prell, who is the Emilie and Phil Schepps Distinguished Professor of Hearing Science, and Angela Shoup BS'89, MS'92, PhD'94, the Ludwig A. Michael, MD Callier Center for Communication Disorders Executive Director.

"I have really appreciated the interdisciplinary nature of BBS, which provided a very strong background in neuroscience and psychology. I've developed as a student and researcher," Kreidler said. "Having the Callier Center as a resource, a point of connection with clinicians and scientists, was a huge pull for me, and I'm grateful for all the ways they engage students."