Associate Professor
University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio
Dr. Rocio Norman is Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the School of Health Professions at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio and director of the Norman Cognitive-Communication Lab (https://labs.uthscsa.edu/normanr/). Her research centers on improving the lives of individuals with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and dementia through behavioral interventions.
Dr. Norman completed her speech-language pathology training at UT Austin and completed a Clinical Fellowship at the VA Polytrauma Center in San Antonio, Texas. Her experience working with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated her desire to pursue clinical research addressing cognitive and communication disorders resulting from combat related mTBI. In 2013, she was recruited to Dr. Lyn Turkstra’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was awarded several training grants to complete her PhD, including an NIH Predoctoral Fellowship, an R25 fellowship through the UW Center for Women’s Health Research, an Emma Allen Speech Language Pathology Fellowship and the American Speech-Hearing Association’s New Century Scholar Award.
In 2018, as a new faculty member at UT Health, she received both a School of Health Professions Pilot Grant and a Texas Society for Allied Health Professions Research Grant to fund her program of research in cognitive and communication disorders secondary to mTBI. In 2019, she was selected as a KL2 Scholar at the University of Texas Health Science Center, where she utilized methods such as discourse analysis and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures to richly characterize language output and shed light on the underlying cognitive mechanisms of language performance after mTBI. Since that time, Dr. Norman has established national and international research collaborations and received competitive funding as PI and site PI from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. She currently serves as PI on funded research addressing: caregiver needs of older adults with dementia, long-term outcomes of combat-related mTBI and clinical interventions for speech and hearing disorders after traumatic brain injury. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Trials, Brain Injury, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Military Medicine, Neuropsychologia and Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
In 2019, Dr. Norman was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award and the George Kudolo Award for Excellence in Research at the School of Health Professions. In 2023 she was nominated for the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine Deborah Wilkerson Early Career in Rehabilitation Award and in 2023 she was selected for the Spectrum Award at the School of Health Professions, an award recognizing all around excellence in research, teaching and service.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
