CDS welcomes three new faculty members to join the academic faculty team

Dr. Adam Sheppard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences.  He received his Au.D. in 2016 and his Ph.D. in 2018, both from SUNY at Buffalo. He completed his clinical externship at the National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research (NCRAR) and worked as a clinical audiologist prior to starting his academic position. As a clinician-scientist, he places his research focus on improving clinical outcomes through testing novel methods to identify and manage complex auditory disorders. He is also interested in improving the prevention of noise-, drug-, and age-related hearing loss. If you want to know more about Dr. Sheppard's work, please visit his website: https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/cds/people/clinicalfaculty/adamsheppard.html

Dr. Nichol Castro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences. She completed a B.A. in Psychology (with Honors) from the University of Colorado, and completed a dual-title Ph.D. in Psychology (Cognitive) and Gerontology from the University of Kansas. She also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Cognitive Aging at the Georgia Institute of Technology (NIA T32 AG000175) and a post-doctoral fellowship in Clinical Aphasiology at the University of Washington (NIDCD F32 DC017074). Dr. Castro's research focuses on word retrieval in aging adults and adults with language impairments (e.g., aphasia, dementia), with a particular focus on how words are organized in memory. Her research uses behavioral studies and computational modeling. If you want to know more about Dr. Castro's work, please visit her website: https://sites.google.com/view/alnlab/home

Dr. Christopher Heffner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences. He completed a B.A. in Linguistics and a B.S. in Psychology at Michigan State University in 2012, and an M.S. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland in 2015. He earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, the University of Maryland in 2017. He also completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut, 2017-2020. His research focuses on plasticity in speech perception. In particular, he looks at learning and adaptation with focuses on how these two processes require our brain to be plastic, to change with experience, and on what happens when brains aren't working properly. If you want to know more about Dr. Heffner's work, please visit his website: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ccheffne