Speech & Hearing Dept. Facility & Resources

The facilities and other resources available to the new hire in the Speech and Hearing Sciences (SHS) Department are fully adequate for the successful launch of neuroscientific research. The SHS Department has a self-contained building on the UNM main campus. The building is approximately 13 years old and was designed specifically to facilitate basic and clinical research. Multiple tenured, federally funded (NIH, DoD, NSF) faculty members within the department have active research programs and are readily available for consultation. The department’s Speech and Hearing Clinic employs seven clinical faculty members who provide services for approximately 130 clients per year. Many referrals for research participants are shared from the clinic to research laboratories, and referrals from research laboratories to the clinic are also made. All research and clinical faculty have private offices, and all research faculty have private laboratories. The SHS Department will provide office and laboratory space for new hires. 

Shared Facilities and Resources

The SHS Department building has ample proximal participant parking. All faculty have the use of the administrative support and meeting spaces of the department that can be reserved – 2 large conference rooms and a shared research data collection room (12’ x 13 room patient room with a 9’ x 13’ observation room with a floor-to-ceiling two-way mirror for observation/supervision). Clinic rooms can be reserved at no cost in case of overflow. All 13 individual clinic rooms are equipped with recording and observation capabilities with recent purchase and installation of Intelligent Video Solutions recording system. The SHS Clinic has a collection of speech-language and neuropsychological tests for all age ranges for various communication and cognitive disorders, an exam room equipped with instrumentation for specialized evaluations (e.g., endoscopic evaluation of swallow function and laryngeal movement, speech and voice analysis, etc.), and a soundproofed audiometric suite fully equipped with state-of-the art equipment.

Computers and Data Storage

SPSS software is available with yearly updates on behalf of the department. Electronic data is stored on UNM servers with access control provided by Active Directory and Sharepoint managed accounts, groups, and permissions. The Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences is currently protected by a dedicated Palo Alto firewall that restricts incoming and outgoing traffic to devices on the department’s network. In addition to the firewall, the Department of Speech and Hearing is located on its own private subnet, thus further isolating the department and its electronic data. IT support currently is provided by the College of Arts and Sciences’ IT Support Center in collaboration with UNM Central IT, which responds to all IT-related issues promptly.