Amanda Gillespie
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
About 23 million Americans have a voice disorder at any given time, with effects on their social, emotional, work and financial well-being. Behavioral voice therapy is the main treatment for over 80% of patients with hyperfunctional voice disorders, problems linked to excess effort in producing the voice.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
voice disorders
dysphonia
voice therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine how clear speech, which emphasizes crisp consonants and precise articulation, relates to voice quality and voice outcomes in speakers with dysphonia.
- Test whether delivery method (hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical) and clear speech are mechanisms of change in voice therapy, to inform future comparative effectiveness trials and the refinement of voice treatments.
More about the research
Yet many patients drop out, and long-term effectiveness data are lacking. A central problem is that skills learned in therapy often fail to carry over into daily life. Most therapy is hierarchical, building step by step toward real conversation. That structure may delay the use of new skills in real-life settings, and it has never been validated for long-term outcomes.
Why it matters
Voice disorders affect about 23 million Americans at a time, and behavioral voice therapy often loses patients before new skills carry over into daily life. Learning whether conversation-based delivery and clear speech instruction drive improvement could help clinicians who treat voice disorders design more effective therapy with better long-term results. This could reduce the public health burden of chronic voice disorders.
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.
Rosemary Lester-Smith
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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