Raul Rojas: ASHFoundation Award Recipient for Research in Childhood Language Development

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Raul Rojas discusses how ASHFoundation funding helped him launch his research career in childhood language development. He reflects on how the ASHFoundation validated the importance, timeliness and critical nature of his research.

TRANSCRIPT

Raul Rojas:
"I have received two sources—two awards—from the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation. The first was a New Century Scholars doctoral scholarship, which I received when I was a doctoral candidate. The purpose of that award is to support doctoral candidates so they can complete their doctoral program. I used that award in order to be able to purchase software, and to be able to focus on completing my dissertation, which I did. And the results of that dissertation have recently been published on child development, and I acknowledged the Foundation. I also feel that that doctoral scholarship helped me when I was looking for faculty positions and also post-doctoral fellowships when I was finishing my doctoral program. The ASHFoundation is very well recognized in our discipline, and many universities recognize that when you receive an award from ASHFoundation, it separates you potentially from other candidates who are also applying for positions. So I feel it definitely helped to distinguish me apart from my work.

Another award that I received from the Foundation, which was last year, was a New Century Scholars research grant. The purpose of that is to allow you to conduct a research project that will help you establish data—pilot data if you will—that you can then use to extend into a larger nationally funded, federally funded, research project. It's something that you receive that will make a major difference in your research program. You know, it's something that not only is it great because it's funding, but it's also great because it's not funding from your university, it's funding from an external source.

When the ASHFoundation decides to give awards to certain individuals for their work, it definitely is a means of validating that that work is important, that they feel that that work is timely, and they feel the work on some degree is cutting edge work that is very necessary for areas of research that are currently badly in need. But I think they also feel that that work actually has potential for growing into something even more significant. So part of it is validation, but part of it is also recognizing the quality of that work, and the belief and the hope that you'll be able to carry that work forward, to be able to do bigger things with that work."