Presenter: Rocío Norman, PhD CCC-SLP
Dr. Rocio Norman is Associate Professor 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 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.
