ASHFoundation Endowment Funds

The ASHFoundation’s endowment funds, many of them established in the name of exceptional researchers and clinicians in the field of communication sciences and disorders, offer sustaining program support. Each endowment fund serves a special purpose, often concentrated in a particular topic area.

Clinical Achievement

Louis M. DiCarlo Fund

Supports the Louis M. DiCarlo Award for Recent Clinical Achievement (view past recipients)

Louis M. DiCarlo was an audiologist and speech-language pathologist who spent his career helping children and war veterans. He held faculty and academic leadership roles in half a dozen educational institutions from Hawaii to New York. He conducted many important research studies, wrote three books and dozens of scientific and general interest articles, and presented papers in London and Italy. Early in his career, while living in Northampton, Massachusetts, DiCarlo founded the first public school class for deaf children in the U.S.

His interest in communication sciences and disorders began when DiCarlo, working in the Schenectady, New York city and county welfare departments during the Depression, became the caseworker for a family with a deaf child. During World War II, DiCarlo served in the Army as battalion sergeant major, treating soldiers deafened in battle. This later led to his important work as chief of audiology and speech pathology at the Veterans Administration.

Rolland J. Van Hattum Fund

Supports the Rolland J. Van Hattum Award for Contribution in the Schools (view past recipients)

Rolland J. Van Hattum was a master teacher and clinician, setting the standard of excellence in service delivery. He was admired for his energy, enthusiasm, and compassion, especially toward children. Van Hattum was the author of many articles and books, including a series on speech-language programming in the schools. He represented the speech-and-hearing profession nationally and internationally on committees and at meetings.

He worked in consulting and leadership roles in the schools, ASHA, and the ASHFoundation, and served as director of the Speech and Hearing Clinic at the State University of New York, College of Buffalo. He was so well known for his support of school-based speech-language pathologists that ASHA’s Public School Caucus honored him with the establishment of the Van Hattum School Professionals Advocacy Award; he was its first recipient.

Research

Lois Bloom Language Development Research Fund

Supports child language research through the New Investigators Research Grant (view past recipients)

Dr. Lois and Robert Bloom established the Lois Bloom Language Development Research Fund to support researchers to advance assessment and treatment strategies for children with language disorders. Dr. Lois Bloom began her professional career in the 1950’s as a speech therapist, working with young children acquiring language slowly and with difficulty. These young patients motivated Dr. Bloom’s decision to study how typically developing children acquire language without problems, beginning with her Columbia University doctoral dissertation (1968) and continuing with her research program in the succeeding thirty years. The results of Dr. Bloom’s research have had widespread influence on assessment and treatment strategies for children with language problems.

Dr. Joan Bruno Augmentative and Alternative Communication Research Fund

Supports researchers and students within the New Century Scholars Research Grant (view past recipients) and the New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (view past recipients)

Dr. Joan Bruno, a pioneering figure in the field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), established this fund to support the advancement of scholarship and research that will shape the future of AAC. In her accomplished career as a speech-language pathologist, Dr. Bruno has specialized in AAC evaluations and treatment. Her visionary work led to many “firsts” for the field, among them an AAC assessment tool (TASP), a dynamic core-word vocabulary program, and an overnight camp for children using AAC and their families.

Brad W. Friedrich Memorial Fund

Supports the Student Research Grant in Audiology (view past recipients)

Brad W. Friedrich was an expert in pediatric audiology. He served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Otolaryngology, as well as the chief of audiology at the Kennedy Institute (now the Kennedy Krieger Institute) in Baltimore for nine years. During the same period, he was also a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics.

Friedrich was active in the profession, serving on ASHA’s Legislative Council and the board of the Hearing and Speech Agency of Metropolitan Baltimore (now the Hearing and Speech Agency of Baltimore). He was also a consultant to the Maryland state department of health. In 1981, Friedrich was awarded the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from Wisconsin State University.

Dennis Klatt Memorial Fund

Supports the Speech Science Research Grant (view past recipients)

Dennis H. Klatt was a noted researcher in speech and hearing science whose research led to contributions to the science and technology of speech recognition by machine. He combined fundamental research of human speech and applied research leading to practical devices, and was interested in speech processing in the auditory system and central nervous system of humans.

Klatt developed a flexible computer-based synthesizer used to generate sounds in basic studies of human speech perception, which later evolved into a complete system for synthesis of speech from English texts. His work was adapted for commercial applications by Digital Equipment Corporation as DECtalk. An author of more than 60 scientific papers, Klatt spent most of his professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a senior research scientist. In 1989, the Klatt Memorial Fund was established by the ASHFoundation and the Acoustical Society of America to recognize the impact of Klatt’s work.

Arlene M. and Noel D. Matkin Memorial Fund

Supports the Student Research Grant in Early Childhood Language Development (view past recipients)

Arlene M. Matkin was a speech-language pathologist whose career focused on young children with multiple developmental disabilities. In an era when "speech correction" was the focus, her concern was language acquisition and delay. It was this concern that led Arlene and her mentor, Julia Malloy, to write a 1975 textbook for parents that highlighted the use of total communication and alternate communication systems, as well as verbal language, depending on the specific child’s strengths and limitations. Arlene also served first as a speech-language pathologist and subsequently as an administrator in public schools, where she championed early identification and intervention for young children with language delays and disorders. Noel D. Matkin was a pioneering pediatric audiologist, whose distinguished professional career was dedicated to early identification and intervention for children with hearing loss and the integration of these children into the mainstream. He served as an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, with a joint appointment at the Hartford Hospital, a tenured professor at both Northwestern University and the University of Arizona, and director at the Boys Town National Research Hospital, heading a multidisciplinary team dedicated to the evaluation and habilitation of children with complex communication disorders.

Wayne and Marilyn Olsen Audiology Research Fund

Supports researchers and audiology students within the New Century Scholars Research Grant (view past recipients) and the New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (view past recipients)

The Wayne and Marilyn Olsen Audiology Research Fund supports research in hearing science. Wayne Olsen’s distinguished audiology career included positions at Northwestern University, Mayo Clinic, and Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. He has contributed more than 100 publications to the discipline, covering areas such as speech perception and discrimination, auditory brainstem response, hearing aid efficiency, and acoustics and amplification in classrooms. He received numerous professional honors and awards. Marilyn Olsen is a graduate of Methodist Kahler School of Nursing as an RN and enjoyed a fulfilling nursing career while also raising three children. Olsen served as a member of the ASHFoundation Board of Trustees from 2007–2009. Rather than leave a gift in their will, the Olsens chose to establish the fund during their lifetimes, so that they can "see and enjoy at least the initial grants to the awardees." Today, they enjoy volunteering at the Mayo Clinic, Methodist Hospital, and Habitat for Humanity.

Ira M. Ventry Memorial Fund

Supports the Student Research Grant in Audiology (view past recipients)

Ira M. Ventry was an audiologist whose career focused on instilling in students the scientific rigor necessary to perpetuate and advance the field of audiology, both clinically and academically. His own research career began with a seminal publication on functional hearing loss.

In 1963, Ventry became one of the first employees at the ASHA National Office in Washington, D.C., serving as associate secretary of ASHA for several years. He later became a professor at Columbia University.

He published in the areas of suprathreshold hearing, conductive hearing loss, hearing screening in the elderly and hearing handicap assessment. His textbook, “Evaluating Research in Speech Pathology and Audiology,” set a high standard for reading and understanding research. It remains a resource for master’s and doctoral students in audiology and speech-language pathology. Ventry was also the co-author of the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly, a self-report questionnaire that is widely used in audiology practices across the country.

Scholarship

Leslie Londer Fund

Supports the Student With a Disability Scholarship, part of the Graduate Student Scholarship (view past recipients)

Leslie Londer, a speech-language pathologist who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1985, established this fund to help those who love the field of communication sciences and disorders and who have the desire to try anything they want, despite a disability. Londer was also concerned with the availability of speech and language clinical services for patients who have been discharged from the hospital. She is the founder of InSpeech, a company dedicated to providing speech and language services to nursing home clients.

After completing graduate study at Columbia University in 1972, Londer was selected to work under Hubert Gerstman of the New England Medical Center and Hospital to set up a clinic in Massachusetts. She is no longer practicing in the field, but her fund remains dedicated to the education of students with disabilities.

Kala Singh Memorial Scholarship Fund

Supports the International Student Scholarship, part of the Graduate Student Scholarship (view past recipients)

Kala Singh was an audiologist who dedicated her life to helping others so they could achieve their communication goals. She was a pioneer publisher of speech-language and hearing publications and co-founded College-Hill Press, Inc., with her husband, Sadanand Singh, founder of Singular Publishing Group, ContentScan, and Plural Publishing. The Singhs co-authored the well-known audiology textbook "Phonetics."

On September 5, 1986, while returning from visiting family in India, Singh was killed during an attempted hijacking of a Pan Am jetliner in Karachi, Pakistan. She was 36. The Kala Singh Memorial Scholarship Fund was established by the ASHFoundation and Little Brown, Inc., in collaboration with Sadanand Singh, to honor her contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the communication sciences and disorders field.

Minority Scholarship Fund

Supports the Minority Student Scholarship, part of the Graduate Student Scholarship (view past recipients)

The Minority Scholarship Fund was the brainchild of Lorraine T. Cole, while she was serving as director of ASHA’s Office of Minority Concerns (now the Office of Multicultural Affairs). Cole felt very strongly that she had "an inherent responsibility to hold the doors to the professions open behind me for other minority students." Because of her personal commitment to the issue, she challenged other professionals of color to demonstrate their own support of this special fund.

NSSLHA Scholarship Fund

Supports the NSSLHA Scholarship, part of the Graduate Student Scholarship (view past recipients)

The ASHFoundation’s NSSLHA Scholarship Fund, established in 2005 in collaboration with the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association’s Executive Council, funds an annual scholarship for an undergraduate senior student who is pursuing a degree in communication sciences and disorders, with an active, national-level membership in NSSLHA, and who will begin graduate study in the fall of the current year.

McLean, Yoder, Schiefelbusch Fund in Severe Communication Disabilities

Group photo of McLean, Yoder, Schiefelbusch

Supports a scholarship within the New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (view past recipients)

This scholarship is awarded to students whose research focuses on addressing the communication needs of individuals with severe disabilities.

Named in memory of Drs. James McLean, David Yoder, and Richard Schiefelbusch, this fund builds on their legacy of supporting the communication needs of individuals with severe disabilities. Their early 1970s book on language intervention for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities helped pave the way for providing communication services and support to those who had previously been excluded.

Dr. Sadanand Singh Scholarship Fund

Supports the Dr. Sadanand Singh Scholarship, part of the Graduate Student Scholarship (view past recipients)

Created in honor of Plural Publishing’s 20th Anniversary, the Dr. Sadanand Singh Scholarship Fund provides scholarships to support graduate students pursuing research in areas aligned with the work of the late Dr. Singh, contributing to evidence-based practices in speech, language, or hearing.

Dr. Sadanand Singh was an author, speech scientist, university educator, publisher, business leader, and, most importantly, beloved mentor and friend to many. His distinguished career was marked by numerous contributions to advancing communication sciences and disorders as a discipline.

An endowment fund may be established with a minimum gift of $100,000. If you would like more information about creating an endowment fund, please contact Sharon Moss at 301-296-8701.