Professor Mason Earns Prestigious Hartwell Research Award to Advance Treatment for Pediatric Speech Disorders

Kazlin Mason, assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, has been named a recipient of the 2024 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Award. Her research, which focuses on advancing treatment for pediatric speech disorders, brings together a cross-disciplinary team to develop more personalized and effective solutions for children born with craniofacial conditions.

“In my lab, we concentrate on pediatric speech disorders,” Kazlin said. “We apply precision medicine approaches to study the anatomy and physiology of speech and resonance, with the goal of optimizing both diagnostic strategies and speech outcomes.” 

A focus area of Kazlin’s work addresses the challenges of assessing and treating velopharyngeal dysfunction or VPD. We spoke with Kazlin to learn more about the work this research award will support.

Q. What is velopharyngeal dysfunction or VPD?

VPD impacts speech understandability and significantly impacts a child’s daily life and ability to communicate. This condition is common among children with cleft and craniofacial differences and often requires surgical intervention to correct. 

Traditional surgical approaches are invasive and unfortunately quite variable in outcome. Even in experienced hands, failure rates can exceed 30%, and many children require multiple revision surgeries.

Q. What are you hoping to change with this project?

Our goal is to shift away from generalized frameworks toward more personalized care. Current interventions rely on decision-making models that don’t fully account for individual anatomic variability, resulting in treatment strategies that often fail to address patient-specific factors critical to surgical success. 

This project focuses on developing both novel surgical approaches and new imaging methods for assessing children’s unique anatomy before surgery. 

For the surgical side, we’re exploring a first-of-its-kind biomaterial designed to promote integration and tissue regeneration for palatal reconstruction. This is still very early-stage, but the idea is to create something that’s less invasive, more durable, and achieves improved long-term speech results.

 Q. How are you approaching this work?

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is how collaborative it is. I’m working closely with colleagues in materials science, biomedical engineering, and surgery. It’s truly a cross-disciplinary effort. 

I see this not just as a single project, but as a launching point for broader collaboration around pediatric applications of regenerative biomaterials, surgical innovation, imaging, and speech science. 

I’m incredibly excited to be working with such a talented team. The work reflects a shared commitment to improving speech outcomes for children.

Q. You also mentioned new imaging methods—can you tell us more?

Yes, the second major part of the project involves extending an MRI-based speech assessment paradigm. 

Right now, surgical decisions are often based on invasive and subjective assessments. We want to change that by giving clinicians objective, high-resolution images of the muscles and anatomy involved in speech production. 

Our goal is to help predict which surgeries are likely to work for each individual child, based on their specific anatomy. That way, we can better match the right procedure to the right patient and improve long-term outcomes. To do this, we are combining AI-based methodologies and computational pipelines to achieve a precision medicine framework. 

This project has the potential to fundamentally shift how we approach VPD treatment, from diagnostics to surgical intervention, and ultimately help more children communicate effectively.