Aug. 3, 2007 -- Lavae Hoffman, one of Curry’s newest professors, has been selected as a 2007-08 Excellence in Diversity Fellow.

The EDF program offers incoming junior faculty members one-year fellowships to help them develop productive long-term careers at the University of Virginia. Through cultivating new and diverse colleagues' connections to the University, the program seeks to help them navigate the challenges of being junior faculty members and fulfill their potential as excellent teachers and researchers  

Dr. Hoffman will join the Communication Disorders Program in the fall 2007 semester and comes to the Curry School from the University of Oklahoma. She researches and teaches in the areas of typical and disordered development of cognitive and linguistic processes, special pediatric populations, and the delivery of speech-language pathology services within school systems.

As a clinical practitioner, she provided speech and language services to children and adults in public school and medical settings for over ten years, and administered local and statewide programs for children with and without disabilities, before beginning her doctoral studies. She has served the profession of speech-language pathology as a university clinical supervisor and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in normal language development, childhood language disorders, diagnostics, and augmentative and alternative communication systems.

After completing her doctorate at The University of Texas, she was the Chief Operating Officer for a market research firm before joining the UT faculty as a research associate where she served as the Austin research coordinator for an NIH funded multiyear, multisite Phase III randomized controlled trial research project investigating language intervention with school-age children. Dr. Hoffman regularly presents on topics related to the academic success of children with language deficits, including response to intervention, narrative assessment, literature-based language intervention, dynamic assessment, attention deficits, and information processing issues.

She has developed and produced award-winning products that utilize multimedia technologies to support secondary education in communication sciences and disorders.  In 2007 she received the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center College of Allied Health Outstanding Faculty in Teaching Award.