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Boys Town’s Lee Evans, Ph.D., Attends NIDCD Diversity Scholar Workshop

 

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Thursday, January 16, 2025

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) recently held its first in-person NIDCD Diversity Scholar Workshop and Boys Town’s postdoctoral research fellow, Lee Evans, Ph.D., was not only invited to attend, but received funding to cover all travel expenses to the conference in Bethesda, Md.

The workshop was designed to promote professional development by facilitating interaction within a cohort of diversity scholars who can then work to further NIDCD’s expansive communications research. During the workshop, which was held Oct. 24-25, participants attended seminars aimed at helping them conduct better research and enhance their career trajectories including:

  • Mentorship best practices and strategies
  • Refining research objectives
  • Overcoming challenges in academia
  • Submitting NIH (National Institutes of Health) grant applications

“I got to meet with my faculty mentor, Karla Washington, who is based in Canada. She’s someone that I wouldn't have had a lot of opportunity to meet and to interact with in depth,” said Evans. “Plus, learning the various mechanisms and having those explained in great detail, from the side of the people reviewing grant submissions was really, really nice.”

The NIDCD Diversity Scholars were also taken on a tour of the NIH campus. Much like Boys Town, the NIH Campus takes up several city blocks. It has its own fire station, the NIH Visitor Center and Nobel Laureate Exhibit Hall, an 870,000-square-foot research center with 200 inpatient beds and more than 1,600 laboratories conducting clinical research.

Dr. Evans and almost 50 other early-career scientists went behind the scenes at the sprawling NIH research facilities. “That in and of itself is a huge thing,” Evans said enthusiastically. “It doesn't sound like a big thing, but it really, really is because people rarely get to go there. The fact that they took the time to plan it and bring people in during an early-career stage shows an investment in those researchers.”

As a member of the Written Language Lab at Boys Town National Research Hospital, Dr. Evans will build on his prior work to examine the relationship between encoding integrity and language development in children with hearing loss and developmental dyslexia, as well as begin to examine the relationship between neural encoding and cortical processing of speech.