Krystal Werfel, PhD, CCC-SLP

I have a bachelor's degree in early childhood development from the University of Tennessee. At UT, I worked in the Teacher Research and Documentation Lab, where I transcribed and coded pre-service teacher semi-structured interviews about classroom management.

 

After graduating, I moved just a bit west to Nashville to get a master's degree in speech-language pathology from the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. I completed a specialty training program focused on interdisciplinary habilitation of children who are deaf and hard of hearing.

 

As a speech-language pathologist, my clinical experiences include early intervention with children who are deaf and hard of hearing, school-age literacy intervention with children with Down syndrome and children with reading disorders, and newborn hearing screenings in a NICU.

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I stayed in Nashville to earn a PhD in child language and literacy from Vanderbilt University. My research focused on spelling and phonological awareness in children with communication disorders. I was a finalist for Outstanding Dissertation of the Year from the International Reading Association. 

 

I completed postdoctoral training in the National Center for Childhood Deafness and Family Communication at Vanderbilt. I was the project manager for an Institute of Education Sciences grant focused on listening effort and fatigue in children with mild to moderate hearing loss.

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Prior to joining Boys Town, I was an associate professor at the University of South Carolina. While at UofSC, I directed the Written Language Lab and taught master's level courses on aural habilitation and pediatric language disorders.