Illinois recognized 16 staff, including SHS office manager Andrea Paceley
Andrea Paceley provides support to SHS’ graduate programs (Photo provided)
Sixteen civil service employees were recognized for exceptional performance by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—eight this year and eight in 2020. For the second consecutive year, concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic precluded a banquet for employees honored with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Staff Award.
Each recipient receives $1,000 and a plaque. Recipients’ names also are engraved on a plaque displayed in the Illinois Human Resources Office. The names of past winners are online.
Permanent staff members with at least two years of service and retired employees in status appointments during the calendar year may be nominated for the award. A committee recommends finalists, who are then approved by Chancellor Robert Jones.
Experiences in managing pandemic-related issues came to the forefront in many of the nomination forms for 2021 recipients, including Andrea Paceley in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Applied Health Sciences.
Paceley, the office manager of SHS, provides support to the graduate program – including graduate admissions – and carries out general office duties.
“The pandemic required a pivot on how we conduct recruitment events, such as our open house for admitted students. Andrea worked closely with the Educational Policy Committee and director of graduate studies to transition to a virtual format,” wrote nominator Ian B. Mertes, an assistant professor of speech and hearing science. “This required a tremendous amount of effort on Andrea’s part to help develop materials, ensure that necessary information was obtained from faculty, interface with the prospective students, schedule the events and send invites, and follow-up with attendees.”
Paceley’s workstation in the front office makes her the department’s first point of contact. “Those who call, e-mail or stop in are greeted with a friendly personality and a willingness to assist. On the occasion when she does not know the answer, she tracks it down and responds quickly,” Mertes wrote. ”She also sends timely reminders to make sure tasks have been completed, keeping departmental operations running smoothly.”
Dr. Wendy Rogers spoke about designing robots that support successful aging
Wendy Rogers at the 2021 McCristal Lecture.
Living independently requires the ability to perform what are called Activities of Daily Living, or ADLs. Fundamental ADLs include things such as bathing, eating, getting dressed, and so on. Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, or IADLs, include more complex activities such as paying bills, preparing meals, managing medications, and the like. In 1998, Dr. Wendy Rogers, Khan Professor of Applied Health Sciences, defined a third level of Activities of Daily Living that she called Enhanced Activities of Daily Living, or EADLs. Activities such as volunteering, taking part in community activities and engaging in hobbies enhance the quality of our lives.
Dr. Rogers, the 2021 King McCristal Distinguished Scholar in the College of Applied Health Sciences, focused her McCristal Lecture on designing robots that support successful aging related to the different kinds of activities. The lecture took place at the Fall College Meeting on August 17.
A world renowned scholar in the area of human factors and aging, Dr. Rogers has been collaborating on research related to human-robot interaction for more than 10 years, going back to her days as a professor of psychology and a principal investigator in the NIH-funded Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since joining AHS in 2017, she has conducted research under the auspices of the Collaborations in Health, Aging, Research, and Technology, or CHART, initiative, and also directs the recently opened McKechnie Family LIFE Home, where much of the research on health and wellness robots takes place.
When designing robots for successful aging, she said, it is important to consider the entire system. “We need to consider the characteristics of the human—their demographics, abilities, attitudes, and experiences,” she said. “We also need to think about the characteristics of the robot. What does it look like? Does it have a personality? What are its capabilities and functionalities? To what degree is it autonomous or being controlled?”
Developers also need to consider the characteristics of the task the robot and human are trying to do together, things such as how critical the task is, and whether it requires the robot and human to be co-located. Finally, the context of the interaction must be considered, whether the task is home-based or in a public setting, for example.
“We also need to think about the characteristics of the robot. What does it look like? Does it have a personality? What are its capabilities and functionalities? To what degree is it autonomous or being controlled?”
Wendy Rogers
2021 King McCristal Distinguished Scholar in the College of Applied Health Sciences
Dr. Rogers and her colleagues currently are investigating usability and other issues related to a robot developed by Hello Robot called Stretch. “We’ve been doing task analyses and prototyping different types of devices that Stretch could have at the end of its arm to perform different tasks, and comparing different types of control interfaces and control by different users,” she said. University of Illinois students soon will have the opportunity to participate in a competition in which they generate ideas for using Stretch to help people aging with long-term disabilities. The prize will be time with Stretch in the LIFE Home to further develop their ideas, guided by the LIFE Home’s expert staff.
Other Illinois research related to health and wellness robots includes designing socially assistive robots, robots with soft rather than rigid arms for telehealth applications, and robots that provide wayfinding assistance to individuals with visual impairments.
“We have made huge advancements in robotics in the last decade,” Dr. Rogers said, “but there’s still a lot more to be done.” And, she concluded, the McKechnie Family LIFE Home positions scholars at the University of Illinois really well to explore some of those questions.
Diego Acosta, a senior in the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism in the College of Applied Health Sciences, is aware of the well-worn axiom, “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”
RST senior Diego Acosta spent the summer as an intern for Prep Baseball Report
The Skokie, Ill., native worked this summer as an intern for Prep Baseball Report (PBR), one of the top independent baseball scouting services in the country. Acosta plans to go to graduate school after he graduates in the fall, but he aspires to work in the baseball operations department for an MLB team.
Like many scouts you might have seen on TV while watching a baseball game, Acosta carried the tools of the trade—a stopwatch and a radar gun—and loved every minute of it.
“I obviously have a passion,” Acosta said about baseball. “And if I have a passion for it—we were learning (that it is) statistically proven that workers that have the biggest passion for what they do will move up higher and faster than anyone else that doesn’t have a passion for what they do.”
Acosta’s love for baseball began when he started playing the sport at four years old.
“I just kept (playing) until I blew my knees out. And when I was looking to go to school, I wanted to play baseball. I knew that I wanted to keep it as a part of my future someway, somehow.”
Acosta was recruited by Cornell University to play baseball before he hurt his knees but felt a natural inclination to the University of Illinois.
“I have a long lineage of Illinois alums,” he said. “My parents went there, my uncles went there, my aunts. I’ve been going (to UIUC) since I was a very young kid, and I just wanted to keep it in. So I decided to just go to school and see what I can do with the baseball team there.”
Thanks to his connections to Illinois, Acosta caught on as a bullpen catcher for the Illini baseball team, which fed his fire to stay in the sport. And, Acosta said, the courses offered in RST are a perfect springboard to a career in sports. He particularly enjoyed Clinical Associate Professor Mike Raycraft’s RST130 (Foundations of Sport Management) course, RST354 (Legal Aspects of Sport), and RST199 (Sport Brand Management), taught by RST Assistant Professor Jules Woolf.
“I feel like when it comes to the business side … there’s definitely times where I’m just like, ‘I remember talking about this in this class, but I’m seeing it here with the whole PBR thing. The Future Games is a perfect example. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Well, this is exactly– we talked about the brand and everything with Dr. Jules Woolf.’ And it’s genius. You bring everybody. You have every single state bring the entire country to one place, and you put on an event in one place across the entire country. It’s absolutely genius.”
For many RST students, a career in the sports industry is the ultimate goal. Some aspire to the customer-service side, some to the hospitality section, and others to the management sector. After all, who doesn’t want to be general manager of the Cubs? But while Acosta definitely dreams of being in a big league front office some day, he is ready to pay his dues first as a baseball scout, an often-grueling job with long hours, low pay and not much notoriety.
“I have a long lineage of Illinois alums,” he said. “My parents went there, my uncles went there, my aunts. I’ve been going (to UIUC) since I was a very young kid, and I just wanted to keep it in. So I decided to just go to school and see what I can do with the baseball team there.”
Diego Acosta
Student, Recreation, Sport and Tourism
“You’ve got to start at the bottom,” he said. “That’s the very first thing I figured out working with PBR, is there’s going to be some really, really, really long days. I was at a tournament in Rantoul from 8 in the morning until midnight. And I get back home, and the Cubs were playing. And I was staying at my apartment with a couple of my buddies that were there for the summer in Champaign. I was like, ‘Put the Cubs game on for me, please.’ And then they were like, ‘Uh, you just watched almost 13 hours of baseball. How do you want to watch the Cubs game?’ I was like, ‘I just want to watch the Cubs game.’ ‘They were like, you’re crazy.”’
Acosta is realistic, knowing how competitive working in the sports industry can be. That’s why he plans to pursue graduate school, possibly law school, upon graduation this fall.
“I have, basically, a plan B,” he said. “And my plan B would be some type of lawyer. I mean, my mom and dad have always joked, ‘Why do you argue so much with everything? Just go be a lawyer.’ I’m like, ‘Honestly, I might.’”
As much as he loves the game, Acosta wants to work in baseball for a reason larger than his appreciation for the sport.
“I’m Mexican-Colombian … and I grew up playing in Humboldt Park, which is like all Puerto Ricans and inner city kids, and then Homer Park. So I have a lot of friends from all different backgrounds,” he said. “And if I can do anything for kids like that, especially in other countries, because I’ve been there. Especially in Colombia, I’ve seen the slums. I’ve seen kids playing with rocks and sticks in the street. And if I could really help them get to their ultimate goal, I feel like that would be really cool for me to do. So that’s why I sort of want to be in professional scouting.”
If hearing above 8 kHz is not important, why is the human auditory system capable of hearing up to 20 kHz?
Brian Monson (Photo by Brian L. Stauffer)
Can you imagine having a conversation that included none of the following consonant sounds: s, sh, f, and ph? Known as voiceless fricatives, much of their energy occurs at the range of human hearing above 8 kilohertz (kHz), called extended high frequencies. In general, consonants tend to have more energy at the extended high frequencies than vowels. Yet conventional clinical hearing tests do not assess the performance of the auditory system above 8 kHz—which is above the highest notes on a piano—because of a longstanding assumption that hearing above 8 kHz is not important.
As Speech and Hearing Science Assistant Professor Brian Monson explains, the assumption took root during the development of the telephone about 100 years ago, when speech signals had to be compressed for transmission across wires. Early researchers simply cut out certain frequencies and asked people if they could still understand what was being said.
“Basically, they found that you didn’t need to hear frequencies above 3 or 4 kHz to have really good intelligibility,” he said, “and that got interpreted as ‘energy at higher frequencies is not important for speech.’”
For more than 10 years, Dr. Monson has been intrigued by and trying to answer the question, “If hearing above 8 kHz is not important, why is the human auditory system capable of hearing up to 20 kHz?” He recently received a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to continue his work in this area with a study titled “The ecological significance of extended high-frequency hearing in humans,” a study on which he will collaborate with researchers at the University of North Carolina and Boys Town National Research Hospital.
Extended high frequencies and noise
In this area of research, Dr. Monson’s basic hypothesis is that not only does extended high-frequency hearing have utility for humans, it plays a role in speech perception. His research group was one of the first to examine the value of extended high frequencies in the speech signal, and the first to demonstrate that extended high frequencies help listeners to determine whether speakers are facing them or turned away from them.
His research has scientific implications, of course, and expanding the state of knowledge in speech and hearing science means a great deal to Dr. Monson. There also is the potential for practical applications of his findings as well, for audiology testing, diagnosis, and intervention.
First of all, only testing below 8 kHz in the clinic does not measure the true function of the auditory system. Extended high-frequency hearing loss is the most common loss in humans because it occurs naturally with aging, with substantial loss occurring even by middle age. So if extended high frequencies are found to play a significant role in speech comprehension, everyone eventually will be affected and everyone will have undiagnosed, or hidden, hearing losses which are not detected by standard audiograms. To date, Dr. Monson and his colleagues have found a modest relationship between extended high frequencies and speech comprehension, but, importantly, it is in noisy environments that extended high frequencies are the most valuable.
“The number one complaint of hearing aid users, for many years, has been that they still have a hard time understanding speech in noisy situations,” Dr. Monson said. “Hearing aids do not represent extended high frequencies.”
Is the impact on speech comprehension large enough to justify taking on the challenge of developing new hearing aid technologies that restore extended high-frequency hearing? That is one of the questions that he hopes to address in the newly funded study. It will expand on a study published in 2019 that simulated a cocktail party but used only two background talkers. The new study will create an even more realistic noisy environment by using multiple talkers in different locations around a listener, as well as realistic reverberations that recreate how sound bounces around different room settings. It also will include a localization experiment to investigate whether extended high frequencies help listeners to determine where the talker of interest is located, with the assumption that this ultimately helps listeners to tune out other talkers.
While he would like his research to result in effective restorative technologies for individuals with extended high frequency hearing loss, Dr. Monson is excited that it already provides compelling evidence for assessing extended high-frequency hearing in the audiology clinic. In a 2020 paper in Hearing Research, he and others argued that implementation of extended high-frequency audiometry into clinical practice is relatively easy. Furthermore, measurements of hearing loss at extended high frequencies do predict speech perception ability in noise, suggesting such measures could be useful in identifying individuals at risk for listening difficulties in noisy situations. As he continues his research in this area, he hopes that continuing to present his findings through journals and conferences that target audiologists will positively impact clinical practice.
Illinois Paralympians made up a large part of Team USA
Half of the 20 University of Illinois-affiliated Paralympians headed to Tokyo for the 2020 Paralympic Games made an appearance Monday at the Division of Disability Resources & Educational Services for a ceremonial sendoff.
One set of athletes—who were supposed to compete last year before the pandemic changed everyone’s plans—will leave for Japan tomorrow, said Joey Peters, who along with Adam Bleakney coaches the Illini track and field team.
Peters said he, Tatyana McFadden, Daniel Romanchuk, Kelsey LeFevour and Alexa Halko are the ones headed to Tokyo early to get acclimated to the time change and the oppressive heat. “It is supposed to the be (warmest) Olympics and Paralympics ever,” he said.
For McFadden, it will be her sixth Paralympic Games, and in that time, she’s collected 17 medals, including seven gold. This year’s Games will be the second for Romanchuk, who has also won the New York City Marathon as well as Chicago and Boston among his many victories. Romanchuk credited Illini coaches, teammates and family for his success.
“It’s almost impossible to get here without a support system,” he said, adding that the encouragement from friends and fans is “almost indescribable. I would not be here without it.”
The Illini track and field team is represented by Hannah Dederick; Jenna Fesemyer; Halko, Yen Hoang, Eva Houston, Lefevour, Ray Martin, Chelsea McClammer; McFadden, Amanda McCrory, Aaron Pike, Isaiah Rigo, Romanchuk, Susannah Scaroni and Brian Siemann. Men’s basketball includes three Illini: Brian Bell, Ryan Neiswender, and Steve Serio, while the women’s basketball team has Kaitlyn Eaton and Ali Ibanez.
All SHS students complete external internships, strengthening real-world skills and career pathways
All SHS students are required to take part in external placements, which are essentially internships with an external organization (Photo by Brian Stauffer)
Students in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Applied Health Sciences expect excellent instruction in the classroom. When they venture off campus, however, is when they get a better sense of the career paths they might choose.
All SHS students are required to take part in external placements, which are essentially internships with an external organization. For some students in the master’s program for Speech-Language Pathology, external placements might begin as early as their second semester, said Noa Hannah, director of the audiology and speech-language pathology clinic in SHS. On the audiology side, said Clinical Assistant Professor Sadie Braun, students are given external placements in the summer after their first year in the four-year program.
“I think that our external placements are really the first place that our students get a sense of what audiology is like in the real world,” Braun said. “I think that’s when a lot starts to gel between what they’re learning in their academic classes and what they’re doing in clinic—that starts to come together when they get to their external placements.”
Hannah, who joined the university in 2019 and became clinic director in 2020, agreed, calling external placements “pivotal.”
“They’re pivotal in their learning because there’s only so much we can teach within the clinic,” Hannah said. “Going out on these externals is about professionalism, but … it’s really about understanding different cultures—different cultures of schools, different cultures of hospitals, different supervisory styles than what we have here at the university. So it’s pivotal in their learning how to apply their skills to new patient populations as well as new environments.”
Braun said audiology students gain experience in environments that we just can’t simulate within the SHS clinic environment.
“For example, we send them to a hearing aid manufacturer to get experience with the manufacturer side of things, or to a private practice or a big hospital so they get to see different environments audiologists can practice in and figure out where they might want to start in their first job,” she said.
Hannah said external placements give students the opportunity to deal with different patient populations, such as patients with dementia or traumatic brain injuries, or patients who have had strokes.
Braun said the external placements also help students to increase their independence and competence in using their skills.
There are also benefits for the organizations, such as hospitals and clinics, in which the students are placed.
“I think a lot of professionals just appreciate having some input in shaping the future of our field,” Braun said. “And when we send our students who have more experience, like a third-year audiology student, sometimes they can utilize that student who can be more independent to get a little bit of extra work done themselves.”
Braun said the external placements can also be a job “pipeline,” as some students are hired right out of their fourth-year placements.
For some UIUC alumni, it is a chance to give back, Hannah said.
“I have heard that they want input into teaching the next generation and I think the other thing is, people like teaching. People like sharing their knowledge … a lot of professionals enjoy that part of their profession and maybe don’t get that opportunity as often as they would like. This is a way to give back to a program that’s helped them to be successful.”
Any organization that is willing to act as an external placement for students in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science is encouraged to email Noa Hannah.
