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 city and county welfare departments in Schenectady, New York, 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.
DiCarlo died on October 29, 1996, at 93.
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.
Van Hattum served in many leadership roles, including as president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (1977) and as ASHA vice president for education and scientific affairs (1973–1976). He was also a member of the ASHFoundation Board of Trustees from 1979–1981 and 1985–1987.
He worked in consulting and leadership roles in the schools, as well 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.
Van Hattum died on March 9, 1987, at 62.
Research
Lois Bloom Language Development Research Fund
Supports research in the area of child language research. 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.
The ASHFoundation will award its first research grant, supported by the Lois Bloom Language Development Research Fund, in November 2020.
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.
Friedrich died October 3, 1987, at 38.
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.
He died in 1988, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a long struggle with cancer.
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 textbook for parents entitled "Your Developmentally Retarded Child Can Communicate: A Guide for Parents and Teachers in Speech, Language, and Nonverbal Communication" in 1975. The book 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.
At the time of her death in 1983, she was a clinical instructor in speech-language pathology at the University of Arizona.
Noel D. Matkin was a pioneering pediatric audiologist, whose professional life was dedicated to early identification and intervention for children with hearing loss and committed to the integration of these children into the mainstream. His served as an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, with a joint appointment at the Hartford Hospital, and as a tenured professor at both Northwestern University and the University of Arizona. He also served as a director at the Boys Town National Research Hospital, heading a multidisciplinary team dedicated to the evaluation and habilitation of children with complex communication disorders.
Noel earned many awards during his professional career, including Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (2000), the American Academy of Audiology Clinical Educator Award (2000), the Fredrich S. Berg Education Audiology Award from the Educational Audiology Association (1996), the Five-Star Faculty Teaching Award from the UA Honors Center (1993), the Cellular I National Award for lifetime contribution in Pediatric Audiology from Vanderbilt University (1991), the Distinguished Teaching Award: Faculty of Sciences at UA (1988), a Clinician Achievement Award in Arizona from ASHA (1984 and 1983), and the Outstanding Teaching Citation from the Associated Students of the UA (1980–1981). He served as a member of the ASHFoundation Board of Trustees from 1993–2001.
Noel Matkin died in 2016.
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.
Wayne Olsen contributed more than 100 publications, 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, including ASHA Fellowship, the ASHFoundation Frank R. Kleffner Clinical Career Award, Fellowship of the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Academy of Audiology James Jerger Award for Research in Audiology; he also has been recognized by the American Auditory Society as a Carhart Memorial Lecturer. 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.
The Olsens established the Wayne and Marilyn Olsen Audiology Research Fund "to give something back." "We are fostering continued research vital to the sustenance of our profession and improving services to those encountering communication difficulties," says Wayne Olsen.
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.
At the time of his death in 1983, he was a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City.
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. The business grew to 225 employees in 14 states, and was sold to NovaCare in 1985.
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 rural 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, as a minority professional who was once a minority student, 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 a special fund. Cole and her colleagues launched various fundraising efforts to solicit funds for this purpose.
The result was an endowment fund for scholarships to benefit American-Indian, Asian, African-American, and Hispanic students.
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.
The Michael Palen Fund will support future programs in research and scholarship, respectively.
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.