Nikki Hoopes and Daniel Ibarra, second-year Ph.D. students from the Davies School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, have received a highly competitive grant for research that holds personal meaning to each of them. They are the first TCU students to receive the Student Research Grant in Early Childhood Language Development from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (ASHFoundation). Only five recipients were awarded the national grant in 2025.
“It was very exciting to find out that not just one of us, but that both of us ended up getting one, Hoopes said. “Especially for two populations that are so underreached. Really, the populations that we’re serving got the grant because they’re the ones who are going to benefit from all of the funds.
Hoopes, along with one other Ph.D. student, is studying the language and literacy skills of 4- to 9-year-olds who
have been exposed to intimate partner violence. While working clinically in a high
school in Arizona, she encountered students who had a history of intimate partner
violence but found that there was little extant research on the literacy and language
outcomes of this population.
“I was really motivated to get a Ph.D. so I could do my part in helping understand this population, to be able to better assess them and provide them with intervention services that they might need very specifically based on their background,” Hoopes said.
Reaching the Underserved
Ibarra’s research focuses on bilingual language development in deaf and hard-of-hearing children. In his 10 years of practice as a speech-language pathologist, he noticed injustices in the experiences of bilingual children, who were often over- and under-identified in the diagnosis of speech-language disorders.
“I was able to see how much awareness I was able to bring, especially to the school
districts that I worked for,” Ibarra said. “I started to see the small changes that
were occurring within those school districts in terms of over-identification and under-identification.”
This experience motivated him to pursue a Ph.D under the mentorship of Dr. Emily Lund, a professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders, where he studies the experiences of bilingual families of children who are deaf and hard of hearing, and how these experiences relate to language development.
He was thrilled to return to TCU, where he earned a master of science in bilingual speech language pathology from Harris College in 2016.
Both students will be conducting their research alongside other Davies School of COSD students – both graduate and undergraduate. Each has a team of seven students who will help with data collection, recruiting participants and data analysis.