Posted 8/29/2008

In operation for 39 years, center offers a wide array
of services and therapy to people

Danielle Varnedoe

USC’s Speech and Hearing Research Center is beginning an advertising campaign to showcase its services and call attention to its talented staff of professionals, says Center Director Danielle Varnedoe.

In operation for some 39 years, the center conducts clinical research and offers a wide array of services and therapy to people with hearing and speech problems.

Moreover, the center also provides hands-on, clinical training for graduate-level students at the Arnold School’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Varnedoe said the center’s ads will appear twice a month, packaged with about a dozen others from a variety of area health care providers. All of the ads are in a Question and Answer format. A banner at the top identifies the series as “Healthy Advice from the Pros.”

Varnedoe says the ads call attention to “the variety of different clinics and the different types of disorders with which we work.”

The ads also highlight individual faculty members. Dr. Heather Shaw Bonilha, founder and director of the center’s Voice Clinic, kicked off the series Aug. 12 with a Question and Answer on voice clearing.

“It’s a common occurrence so she thought it was a good idea to discuss. We also have had a few people call about it,” Varnedoe said.

Throat clearing is something that Bonilha knows about. She currently is researching the behavior with a grant from the NIH National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Bonilha is the kind of talented person on which the ads focus. She is this year’s sole recipient of the Early Career Contributions in Research Award presented by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association.

Varnedoe said several ads are already prepared on topics such as stuttering, hearing loss, stroke recovery, and speech and hearing issues for bi-lingual persons. For a complete list of the clinic’s services, visit the clinical services page on the center’s web site.

The ads are assembled by a Fort Smith, Ark. business. The company says similar ads appear in about 55 U.S. newspapers in markets ranging from 17,000 to 700,000 readers.

The clinic is located at 1601 St. Julian Place in Middleburg Plaza off Forest Drive in Columbia, SC.