Deirdre A. Schlehofer - Featured Faculty 2012

In her second year at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology as an assistant professor, she has received the RIT Vice President's 2011 seed funding, for her research entitled "Perceptions of health practices in an underserved community: Deaf and hard of hearing female college students at NTID/RIT" (working with undergraduates, giving science posters at NIH-funded conferences and writing a paper in progress); the 2012 COLA-NTID Partnership award entitled, "An in-depth examination of child maltreatment in deaf and hard of hearing college students: Development of a culturally sensitive computer-based survey" with Drs. Lindsay Schenkel (PI), and Gail Rothman-Marshall (co-PI) from the Department of Psychology with herself as PI, which will lead to submission for NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15); and the 2012 FEAD grant entitled, "Second Language Learners' discrimination of phonological contrasts in ASL and effects of perception" which is used to develop effective teaching strategies as well as to help students to develop robust fluency in producing and comprehending sentences in ASL. She is collaborating with Dr. Christopher Homan from the RIT Department of Computer Science and Dr. James DeCaro from Center on Access Technology, along with other colleagues, on an R21 grant due this year.

Having resided in Alaska, Scotland, England and Zimbabwe, Dr. Schlehofer has long held an interest in cultures and languages with diverse Deaf groups. Dr. Schlehofer has recently completed a year-long multidimensional mentoring project - an Upstate New York Initiative (NIH-funded) in promoting resilience among under-represented minorities and women in junior faculty positions in biomedical research related fields.