Spotlight on our Awardees: Susan Thibeault, PhD

Awardee Spotlight

Susan Thibeault, PhD
2000 Graduate Student
Scholarship and 2002
Research Grant for New
Investigators recipient

Focus(ed) on Voice

Susan Thibeault entered doctoral study interested in the study of voice. But what about voice? She couldn't have told you then. Her aim was given focus—and her career a healthy jump start—when her mentor Diane Bless suggested she might look into the molecular genetics of voice, an area in which, at the time, few researchers were working.

Fast forward to the present. Thibeault is now director of the Voice and Swallowing Clinics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she oversees the work of 15 speech-language pathologists as well as a new generation of PhD students. Her excitement for her subject is undiminished since her own graduate years. "The advancement of technology has allowed me to do research in voice that was never possible before," she says. "We can now provide insight into the mechanism of different voice disorders that we hadn't been able to investigate earlier." Specifically Thibeault is working on methods of tissue regeneration of the vocal fold extracellular matrix and at better defining the immunological and bacterial character of this valuable tissue.

Thibeault's 2000 ASHFoundation Graduate Student Scholarship gave her, she says, "the confidence that I was doing the right thing." Then, when she was awarded a 2002 Research Grant for New Investigators for her proposal on "Gene Expression Profile Analysis of Reinke's Edima," it provided her work a crucial boost both in purely financial terms—the funding allowed her to recruit subjects and actively pursue the research—and in an equally crucial but less Thibeault - in lab tangible way: "Especially as a new investigator, if you've been funded by the ASHFoundation, it increases your credibility dramatically. People recognize what you've had to do to win the award."

Thibeault is "completely and absolutely certain" that her awards were responsible for her present "once-in-a-lifetime job" that is enabling her to do the work that she believes "could be part of the foundation that others will build upon." For this reason she encourages support of the ASHFoundation. "When people donate they're not just giving money for this year but for tomorrow," she says. "Today's work is the future of the field. To support it is vital."