Congratulations, Dr. Grela!
Join us in congratulating Dr. Bernard Grela on his retirement! Dr. Grela worked in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences department at the University of Connecticut for 25 years. Dr. Grela was an Associate Professor and is a speech-language pathologist. His area of expertise includes language and literacy disorders in children, and taught courses on assessment, intervention, and treatment of language disorders in children, speech sound disorders, as well as an undergraduate course on articulation, voice, and fluency. Dr. Grela’s research has focused on linguistic complexity and the impact of complexity on grammatical errors in children. To celebrate his accomplishments, we interviewed him to discuss the trajectory of his career as well as plans to enjoy retirement.
Q&A:
Q: What interested you about a career in speech-language pathology?
A: “I actually started off as a business major as an undergrad where I grew up in Canada. After my first year of business, I decided that wasn’t really the thing for me. I transferred into psychology, and it wasn’t until about 2-3 years into the program that I met someone who was a speech-language pathologist. There was no undergraduate or graduate program in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at the University of Saskatchewan, but they had a couple of courses about communication disorders and normal language development, and I absolutely loved them. For graduate school, I attended Purdue University where I got my Master of Science degree and started my career as an SLP. I was very fortunate because the Canadian government paid for my master’s degree. In return, I went back to Canada where I worked as a speech language pathologist for five years before deciding to go back and get a Ph.D. in speech-language pathology.”
Q: Which settings have you practiced in as a speech-language pathologist?
A: “I worked for a government agency called Saskatchewan Health and we primarily provided services to children birth to five years of age. We also worked with the adult population with various kinds of disorders like strokes, aphasia, traumatic brain injuries, voice disorders, and fluency disorders.
As a Ph.D. student, I was working on a research grant recruiting kids who are now known as having developmental language disorders and working in a research lab. I supervised graduate students during the summer where we ran a summer camp for children with developmental language disorders. The children participated in experiments in exchange for free speech and language services.
When I started as a faculty member at UConn, 25 years ago, I also got licensed in Connecticut as an SLP and so I continued to consult with the public schools throughout the state.”
Q: Can you tell us about your research career at UConn and how it progressed?
A: “When I came to UConn, my first 5-10 years of research was focused on children with developmental language disorders, we called this disorder specific language impairment at the time. My research was looking at linguistic complexity and its impact on grammatical errors in children. So I asked whether more grammatical errors would be seen when children with developmental language disorders produced more complex and longer utterances? So that’s something that seemed to play a significant role. We also looked at nonverbal aspects of cognitive systems that supported language, like auditory working memory and visual memory. I also collaborated with researchers in Linguistics and Psychology who were interested in studying children with language disorders. The latter part of my career was looking at the provision of services to families that come from diverse backgrounds. In recent years, we have some research on assessment and identification of children with language disorders who come from different dialects or language groups, but we still need to learn a lot about service provision to these people. So modifying the way we think about working with clients who come from different cultural backgrounds is essential. That shift was really driven by a training grant and collaborations that I have had with researchers in the Neag School of Education and the School of Social Work. I also supervised graduate students who worked with adults with reading disabilities, dyslexia, and underlying language disorders in Hartford, where we looked at their auditory memory and visual memory abilities. I’m currently involved in a couple of collaborations working with individuals on the autism spectrum as well. That’s been driven by a graduate student’s master’s thesis. I’m going to continue to do some collaboration with Dr. Spaulding during my retirement.”
Q:What will you miss most about UConn SLHS?
A: “The people that I work with were wonderful. And one thing I do worry about is not working with young people. Working with students really gives you that boost of youth and energy. The campus is also beautiful. So three things: The people I work with, working with students and then the geography of the campus.”
Q: Do you have any advice for future students and clinicians?
A: “Enjoy your days as a student and as a practicing clinician. As a student, there’s so much stress, especially with the master’s degree. You’ve got so many courses to take. Find time to let loose every once in a while. And try to keep up with the things that change in our field. Once you graduate, go to conventions, and read as much as you can, because the way we provided services and think about providing services has really changed. Talk to the people you went to school with, because they’re going to be your lifelong friends and colleague and they’re going to have different areas of expertise and different backgrounds. Those are the people you’re going to contact and say “Hey, I have a question about a client I’m puzzled about. Can you help me with this?”
Q: What are your plans for retirement?
A: “So, I have a relatively large vinyl and CD collection. I spend a lot of time listening to music. I have a room that’s dedicated to listening to music that I call, “the listening room,” and I can sit there, relax, and play records. I had given up reading for leisure because I did so much reading at work, so that’s something that I’m going to do more of, especially science fiction, biographies about music, bands, and medical aspects of aging. I’m also thinking of doing some volunteer work. I want to volunteer at a local senior center because they run a memory program for people with dementia where I could utilize my expertise in the area of language and memory to help the aging population. I also will be doing some traveling as well. I’m going on a cruise from New York to Quebec City. Then the plan is to spend winters in Puerto Rico and start learning to speak Spanish.”
