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Dawna Lewis, Ph.D.
Boys Town National Research Hospital
Pediatrics
Omaha, Nebraska
Professional Bio:
Dawna Lewis received her M.A. in Audiology from the University of Tennessee and her Ph.D. in Communication Disorders from the University of Nebraska.
She currently works as a Senior Research Associate at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Dr. Lewis has presented and published on topics involving pediatric audiology/amplification and assistive listening devices, including FM systems. She received the Editor's Award from the American Journal of Audiology for two 1994 articles on assistive technology in the classroom. Dr. Lewis also received the 2006 Folsom Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award from the University of Nebraska. Dr. Lewis has served on the steering committee for ASHA Special Interest Division 9, Hearing and Hearing Disorders in Childhood, the Joint Committee of ASHA and the Council of Education of the Deaf, and the Research and Creative Endeavors Committee of EAA. She also has served as an Associate Editor for Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools and on the Editorial Board of Seminars in Hearing. Currently, Dr. Lewis is involved in research addressing issues in pediatric amplification and speech perception in children.
What got you started in the field?
I had never heard of audiology before attending college. I first heard about the field from some friends who were studying deaf education. I visited the speech and hearing department and became interested in the area. I still was not sure, however, and did not make a decision about my major until the very last week that majors could be declared. My choices were psychology and religion, nursing (my mother was a nurse and I had worked as a nursing assistant throughout college), and speech and hearing. After making the decision to enter speech and hearing, it took only a short time in my first semester of undergraduate classes to decide that audiology, rather than speech was the direction for me. From that point, I haven't looked back. It did take me 19 years to go back for my PhD when my original plan had been to only work for 1-2 years before returning, but that's another story .
Do you have any interesting/funny stories from when you
first started out in the profession?
Although I was born in the northeast, I spent most of my life growing up in Virginia. I moved to Nebraska from Tennessee after graduate school. One day while walking down the hall with a patient and another colleague (who was from Arizona), my colleague heard the patient speak to me in what she thought was a foreign language. To her amazement, I responded! It turns out he only had a very strong southern accent and she hadn't had time to acclimate to it yet. Along that same note, when I first came to Nebraska I still had a few words that came out with a pretty strong southern accent. It always amused my colleagues when one of the children I was testing would respond to live-voice word recognition testing using the exact same accent. Although it clearly demonstrated that they could repeat what they heard, it was a good reason for going to recorded speech!!
What is your favorite thing about your job?
My favorite thing about my job right now is the work and collaboration on clinically relevant questions related to hearing loss in childhood. I like being able to ask questions, think about how to examine them and then conduct the investigations. It is especially rewarding when the information we obtain is useful clinically, bridging the gap between research and the clinic. | 