Meet Past President of ASA, Dr. Patricia Kuhl

 Meet Past President of ASA, Dr. Patricia Kuhl

​Dr. Patricia Kuhl on the night she was awarded ASA’s Gold Medal in Paris, France in 2008.

Dr. Patricia Kuhl, Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America since 1982, was the vice president of the Society from 1996-1997 and served as the first female president from 1999-2000. Dr. Kuhl was awarded the Silver Medal in Speech Communication in 1997 for her contributions to speech perception and production, the Gold Medal for her work on early learning and brain development in 2008, and has played an active role in the Society throughout her membership^[1].

Dr. Kuhl obtained her B.A. in both Speech Communication and Psychology from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota in 1967 and then moved to the University of Minnesota where she earned her M.A. in Speech Science (1971) and her Ph.D. in both Speech Science and Psychology (1973).  In 1977, after a post-doctoral position at the Central Institute for the Deaf, Dr. Kuhl started as an assistant professor in the department of speech and hearing sciences at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, where she continues to this day. Currently, she holds the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, and is also co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS)—which she and her husband started in 2004—and professor of speech and hearing sciences.  She is not the only hard-working academic in her family. Pat’s husband, Andrew Meltzoff, is a professor of psychology and co-director at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, and Pat’s daughter, Katherine Stavropoulos, is an assistant professor in special education at the University of California at Riverside. Dr. Kuhl is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

We had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Kuhl about her fascinating research on the human brain and language development, how she navigated earlier days in the ASA as one of the only females, and her experience as ASA president.

Tell us a little about your career path and journey to where you are now.

My fascination with language started when I was young. One year my extended family had a reunion. This was the first time I met one of my nieces who is deaf; I was ten and she was four. I come from a huge Minnesota family, and when we get together there are enough people to form multiple teams for a game of baseball. So we were out playing baseball when she had a ball coming directly at her. We all screamed at her, “duck!!” but she didn’t respond. She had been turned away from the ball and it hit her directly in the head. I remember being struck that she couldn’t hear us. “She can hear absolutely nothing. What are we doing to help her?” I asked my parents. “Will she learn how to speak sometime in her life?” I remember my parents saying that they didn’t know that she ever would. This was crazy to me, that you could live your whole life and not speak or understand. I thought it was such a tragedy and someone ought to be able to do something about that.

In 1968, I was a graduate student in speech and hearing sciences at the University of Minnesota and fascinated by language deficits in people who had been diagnosed with aphasia, which is a language deficit caused by brain damage following a stroke. My initial assignment as a graduate student was on the aphasia ward in neurology at the Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in Minneapolis. I was part of a team of residents and neurology faculty who provided language therapy to patients with aphasia. An important part of that experience was discussing research data during grand rounds. At that time, there were no brain imaging devices, so brain autopsies were critical to our understanding of the mechanics of the brain. During autopsy, the chief of pathology prepared one-millimeter slices of the brain of a patient who had been diagnosed with aphasia. I had often treated the patient as the therapist while they were alive, giving them elaborate tests to understand their language abilities. Can they understand sentences? Can they produce sentences? Then, during the autopsies, my assignment was to present the clinical observations in support of a hypothesis about where the specific telltale signs of brain damage—hairline cracks and noticeably softer tissue due to the stroke—would appear in the various slices we viewed of the patient’s brain.

I remember treating a pediatric neurosurgeon who had had a stroke and could only utter a single syllable, ‘Ta.’  I treated him for a year so I knew a lot about him. When he died, it was really profound to be in that autopsy room and see his brain and realize I knew that person. I had this emotional reaction, but I also had this intellectual drive to say, “look I know what he could and couldn’t do.” His speech understanding was quite good, the problem was he couldn’t articulate and produce speech. When it came time, I said, “I think we should see more damage in Broca’s Area, where speech production is controlled, than in areas related to speech comprehension.” Sure enough, it looked like the tissue in that area of the brain was softer, grey, and had more cracks in the motor regions. It was sobering, and challenging, and yes, it was an exciting experience. I think that was why I was bitten. The idea that you could connect brain to behavior, as crude as that was, was exciting. This is still what my institute is doing—we are trying to connect the ability of a person to learn and know things to the brain circuitry.

My experience at the VA was short lived because within nine months of my arriving at the VA my supervisor succumbed to cancer and I was back at the university asking another mentor, psychologist Jim Jenkins, how to continue my research. Jenkins’ reply changed my life: “Why not start at the other end of the continuum – study language in baby brains rather than aging adults – no one is doing that,” he said. I never looked back, and was forever grateful for the advice.

Now I study early language learning and the development of the infant brain. This work has taken me to three White House conferences to speak: the Clinton White House in 1997, the Bush White House in 2001, and the Obama White House in 2014. I was the first in the world to put a baby in a magnetoencephalography (MEG) machine, a non-invasive way of studying brain activity. The frontiers are wide open to study areas like the developing brain and how language comes about in a child. It’s such exciting work, and this is why I haven’t retired yet.

What inspired you to run for ASA president?

Ken Stevens, an engineer at MIT and later an ASA President (1976-1977), was always very active at ASA meetings. Ken would attend and comment on many of the talks and poster presentations, and he always came to mine and had a lot of comments. At most meetings, we’d find time to have coffee, lunch, or dinner to debate theory and data. At one meeting, he asked whether he could nominate me for the ASA Executive Council. He explained to me that doing great science wasn’t really enough to advance the field completely – to do that you had to volunteer and keep the ASA alive and looking forward. Ken was also keen to advance the careers of women and noted that there were very few women represented at any level of ASA governance. He said that we had to diversify governance if we were ever going to attract more women and be more racially diverse in the ASA. Who could disagree with that argument? I said yes and was elected to Council. My decision to run set up a cascading series of elections: from Council to Vice President, and then finally to President of the ASA. I’m very proud to have been elected the first woman President of the Acoustical Society of America.

What was the biggest challenge you have faced in your career? And as ASA president?

I think balancing scientific career goals, marriages, children, and service to society is a huge challenge for anyone, but for women especially. It really is difficult to “have it all” as they say.

Timing in life is particularly important. I waited until I was a full professor before I had my daughter. I was so rapidly climbing the academic ladder I hadn’t really had time to do it. It was an era when a lot of women were making the decision not to have kids and focus on their career. Women have a hard time with this. They are the ones who bear children. Women will spend more time than their partners at raising their children and doing all the household maintenance to bring that culture together. Many women are also in fields where they are discriminated against, yet still strive to reach the highest levels of achievement. I think this balancing act is not simple and there have to be discussions amongst partners about all of this, arranging life so that both people can succeed. That takes planning and energy. I think it’s trickier for women than men for all these reasons. Looking back though, there isn’t a single opportunity I wished I’d passed on because it was too difficult. I was all in. That meant doing exciting science, having a wonderful family (my daughter is herself now an assistant professor married to a physicist whose work brings him to the ASA meetings!), and volunteering for the ASA – all of which have brought me great joy.

Dr. Kuhl lecturing at UW.

As ASA President there were no big financial crises, we were not trying to revamp the way we published journals, there were no big issues. I wanted to empower students. I wanted to get more women into the Society and increase diversity in terms of age, gender, and ethnicity. So the biggest challenge for me was to make the Society more open to a variety of people. It was an interesting time. I was the first woman President and before me was Jim West, the first Black president. People’s eyes were finally opened to this goal.

What was your biggest contribution to ASA as president?

When I went to my first ASA meeting, over 50 years ago, there were so few women you could count them on one hand. I started paying attention to it because I found it so awkward. I remember I had this blue dress on, and I kept thinking I looked so out of place. I just wished I had worn black or anything that would make me look less obvious. There were maybe 15-18% women in speech communication but other TC’s had zero. This became an issue I really wanted to crack.

The few women in the Society started speaking to the men and talking about diversity. We created a Women in Acoustics Committee and a women’s lunch.  We started doing things that would bring female students to the meetings–a student social, a free drink for students– and then we made sure that senior women attended those gatherings and spoke to the new women. I ran sessions where females were the organizers and brought women speakers to the Society.

These were all things I did as a leader in the Society, but as ASA President specifically, I established the Student Council. We did a reasonable job of attracting students but there wasn’t a way for them to empower their ideas. Students had no way for the things they wanted, needed, or initiatives to be carried up the chain of command, except through their advisors. The Council was set up so they could have initiatives and bring ideas forward. It allowed students to be part of the governance of the ASA, and it gave them a voice for the first time. I think that that was a significant change.