Leader in field of swallowing disorders reflects on groundbreaking career

Northwestern Now: Summaries

Bonnie Martin-Harris is a pioneer in the standardization of identifying and treating swallowing disorders. Martin-Harris, the Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences, delved into her career-defining work during the 12th annual Pepper Lecture at the Francis Searle Building on April 19.
“Safe and efficient swallowing requires fifty-five pairs of muscles, complex neural control, and coordination of multiple body systems,” said Martin-Harris, who is also the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the School of Communication. “Unlike healing an arm or a leg, the ability to rewire the synergy involved in swallowing is a complicated and often difficult process…. We all know what it feels to swallow something and have it go down the wrong way, but imagine feeling that every time you swallow a sip of water.”
The lecture was made possible by the generous donation of Northwestern alumni Roxelyn and Richard Pepper, who endowed the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department in 2005. Before the lecture, School of Communication Dean Barbara O’Keefe thanked them for their longstanding support.
Martin-Harris, who has spent her career focusing on patient-centric research, spent years fighting for standardization in the diagnosis and treatment of dysphagia—swallowing disorders—which can be caused by such conditions as cancer, stroke, parkinson’s disease, and trauma. Martin-Harris was inspired to seek standardization after working with patients, one of whom was a vibrant woman who’d lost the ability to swallow after treatment for jaw and mouth cancer. Her patient, who died in 2012, first came to her with files of tests she’d taken with other clinicians — but Martin-Harris said she was unable to glean any useful information from them.
“She had ten swallowing reports, but none was like the other,” Martin-Harris said. “I had to restudy her again. And that should not be. I felt patients should be able to go from ...

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