Rosemary Lester-Smith
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
A shaky voice can make speaking tiring and hard to understand. For many people with essential tremor (ET), the most common movement disorder, this is a daily problem.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
vocal tremor
essential tremor
movement disorders
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Determine whether simultaneous neck-skin vibration sensor and head-mounted microphone recordings can tell apart breathing, voice box and vocal tract contributions to vibrato, a voice-modulating technique, in trained singers.
- Test whether the same paired signals identify which body systems produce the shaking in speakers with vocal tremor linked to essential tremor.
- Assess whether neck vibration sensor and microphone measures capture changes in voice modulation after botulinum toxin injections into the larynx in speakers with vocal tremor.
More about the research
Up to 62% of people with ET develop vocal tremor (VT), a rhythmic shaking that can come from the breathing system, the larynx (voice box), the throat and mouth, or the passages behind the nose. The shaking makes pitch and loudness waver. Treatments work inconsistently, partly because clinicians lack easy ways to find which body systems are involved. Nasolaryngoscopy, a camera passed through the nose, is costly, requires training, is limited to large voice centers and cannot see the breathing system. Ordinary microphone recordings mix the sound made at the voice box with the shaping done by the throat and mouth, so they cannot pinpoint the source.
Why it matters
Vocal tremor harms communication, work and quality of life for many people with essential tremor. A low-cost assessment using a neck sensor and microphone could help clinicians outside large voice centers identify which body systems are shaking. This could support more targeted, individualized voice therapy and give clinicians a way to measure how patients respond to treatments such as botulinum toxin injections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Teresa Drulia
Texas Christian University, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether local translaryngeal vibration (LTLV), a gentle vibration applied over the voice box, improves outcomes when combined with flow phonation therapy in patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD).
Laura Toles
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Identify personality traits and daily voice behaviors that come before phonotrauma, by following vocally healthy college freshman singers for three years with personality inventories, ambulatory voice monitoring and high-speed videoendoscopy.
Amanda Gillespie
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare patient outcomes, including long-term outcomes, between Conversation Training Therapy (CTT) delivered non-hierarchically within conversation from the start and a reproducible hierarchical version with the same components.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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