I was born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan and received my undergraduate degree at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio. I began my corporate career in Chicago, at Baxter Healthcare and after numerous corporate mergers, was fortunate to be transferred to Denver, CO. It was at this time, I realized that my career in the corporate world was not fulfilling me in the ways I had hoped it would and I began volunteering at The Children’s Hospital in Denver. I had the opportunity to observe a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) work with a boy who was not speaking after multiple surgeries. With the kind and gentle support of this SLP, the boy began speaking, smiling, and playing again. Based on this experience and my aspirations for a new career, I enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder and received my master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology.
I completed my clinical fellowship year at The Children’s Hospital in Denver and began working on staff in the Pediatric Department at the Mapleton Rehabilitation Center at Boulder Community Hospital. During this work experience, I served as the augmentative communication specialist and worked with children in the areas of articulation, oral motor, language development, literacy, and auditory processing.
After working for several years in this capacity, I put my SLP career on hold to become a full time mother and raise our two boys. Ironically, my first son was born with a hearing loss, so I entered the world of support and therapy as a parent of a child with a disability. This experience changed my perspective and enabled me to enhance my outlook and approach toward therapy services and working with families. Today, I offer a collaborative approach as an SLP specialist and feel strongly that speech and language therapy should be a partnership based on teamwork between the child, family, and therapist.
In addition to my private practice, I was a clinical supervisor for The University of Colorado’s Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences department. I supervised speech and language graduate students for a practicum focusing on preschool language and emergent literacy development.