Rate My Professor Kris Tjaden

Kris Tjaden is a Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at the University at Buffalo, where she serves as Associate Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Director of the PhD Program in the department, and Director of the Motor Speech Disorders Laboratory. She earned her PhD in Communicative Disorders and Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MA from the University of Minnesota. Tjaden holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology (CCC-SLP) from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

Her research focuses on the acoustic bases of reduced intelligibility and naturalness in dysarthria secondary to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis, the effects of deep brain stimulation surgery on speech outcomes in Parkinson's disease, behavioral therapy techniques that maximize functional communication in dysarthria, and an articulation-focused approach to dysarthria classification. Tjaden has secured major funding from the National Institutes of Health, including a $3.1 million grant to investigate speech and movement in Parkinson's patients and a five-year grant supporting Motor Speech Disorders Lab projects. She received the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Speech Editor’s Award in 2005 and was elected a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association for outstanding achievements in research, education, and service. Key publications include Stipancic and Tjaden (2022), "Clear speech effects: An investigation of intelligibility and effort in Parkinson’s disease," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology; van Brenk, Stipancic, Kain, and Tjaden (2022), "Intelligibility across a reading passage: The effect of dysarthria and cued speaking styles," American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology; Lam and Tjaden (2016), "Clear speech variants: An acoustic study in Parkinson’s disease," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; Tjaden, Kain, and Lam (2014), "Hybridizing Conversational and Clear Speech to Investigate the Source of Increased Intelligibility in Parkinson’s Disease," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; and Tjaden, Sussman, and Wilding (2014), "Impact of Clear, Loud and Slow Speech on Scaled Estimates of Intelligibility and Speech Severity in Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis," Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Highly cited works encompass "The influence of speaking rate on vowel space and speech intelligibility for individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis" (1995) and "Rate and loudness manipulations in dysarthria" (2004).