September 25, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu

When Danielle Varnedoe heard USC was hiring in 1983, she thought she’d simply contribute a few hours each week to the university’s speech and hearing clinic doing what she did best – providing speech therapy to preschool children while teaching master’s students to do the same. That part-time position turned into a 40-year adventure, with Varnedoe leading the clinic for 20 years and contributing to the growth and evolution of the school and the field for more than four decades.

“When I first started with the department, we were focused on serving children and engaged in very little research,” Varnedoe says. “Over the 40 years I spent at the Arnold School, we changed all of that. We evolved to become research leaders in field, and the clinic grew to serve clients of all ages and challenges.”

The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (COMD) was formed all the way back in 1968 – making it the oldest of the Arnold School’s six departments, though it was the last to join the school. It was established to do what communication departments did back then – prepare students to become speech-language pathologists – and it had the added bonus of an onsite clinic. This clinic provided much-needed services to local residents – mostly children with speech delays, apraxia, fluency, articulation and other communication disorders – while also providing a clinical setting for students to practice their skills.

This would change dramatically over the years – transforming the department from an academic unit with a singular focus to a clinical/research powerhouse with multiple specialty areas serving patients across the lifespan. What would not change was the close-knit comradery and collaboration embraced by members of the department.

 

The early years

Arthur (Art) Weiss was the founding director of the COMD department, which was known as Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at the time and located in the College of Education. Under his leadership, USC launched the state’s first master’s program in the field.

Gale Coston took the helm in 1973 and oversaw the migration of the department over to the College of Public Health and Associated Health Programs. He played a major role in developing South Carolina’s first Cleft Palate/Craniofacial Clinic and held multiple administrative roles for both the Arnold School and USC. His wife, Carol Coston, led the clinic from 1973 until 1988 – working hard to expand the clinical placement program for the department’s master’s students so they could gain experience in school, hospital, and private practice settings beyond the university.

It was also during the Coston years that the department, with Hiram McDade leading its efforts, developed its distance education program for preparing students to become speech-language pathologists. Varnedoe says the addition came about both organically and strategically.

“There was a real need for continuing education credits for current speech-language pathologists in the field, and Gale suggested that we develop training for our alumni and in a way that they could easily access it,” Varnedoe remembers. “At the same time, there was a movement to change the perception of the profession. They weren’t just therapists in public schools – though that was important – they were highly skilled clinicians who could treat patients of all ages experiencing a variety of communication challenges.”

In an effort to transform this image, let the world know what they could do, and meet the needs of aspiring speech-language pathologists who couldn’t always put their lives on hold to get their master’s degrees, the department developed the distance education program. McDade and Crystal Murphree-Holden, who has served as its director for the past 20 years, were big proponents of the program and helped make it happen.

Bill Cooper took two turns in the chair position (1981-1983 and 1996-1998) with a seven-year term as the department’s first graduate director in between. He still found time for his own research pursuits – developing the department’s Cochlear Implant Program and publishing widely. Throughout this period, various faculty members expanded the department’s breadth and depth of specialty areas by adding their own expertise. For example, Judy Martin, who led the clinic throughout the 1990s, brought fluency courses to the master’s program.

In between Cooper’s chairships, a major turning point arrived for the department when Winona Vernberg, dean of the School of Public Health, approached them about joining her school. It was not a typical home for COMD departments, but Vernberg believed that COMD research and services could benefit the health of the public, and the Arnold School welcomed both the COMD and exercise science departments into its ranks in 1989.

“Most COMD programs were in colleges of education at the time, because they were only known for preparing students to become speech-language pathologists in schools,” Varnedoe says. “That role was important to us, but we wanted to go beyond what our peers were doing to be leaders in the field, and it was an honor to be invited to join a research-focused school of public health.”

All in for research

One of the most dramatic shifts in the department’s history came about in the early 2000s. Elaine Frank had earned her Ph.D. from the department back in 1988 and had returned as an assistant professor in 1991. The early-career scientist was passionate about research and founded the Adult Neurological Disorders Laboratory, focused on neurological disorders, such as stroke, dementia and brain injury in children and adults – with the latter group being a significant expansion of the department’s patient population compared to their focus thus far.

Frank also added a neurological track concentration for master’s students looking to specialize in this emerging area of expertise. Around the same time, other new faculty joined the department, starting the auditory verbal program the department is well known for today.

“These additional services and specialty areas really increased the population at the clinic,” Varnedoe says. “Up until that point, we had been relying on off-campus placements to give our students the opportunity to work with adults, but that changed once we had clinical faculty – and accompanying research – onsite to serve this population.” 

When Frank took on the chair position in 1999, she began a 13-year period of significant growth and an even greater emphasis on leveraging research to tackle the complex challenges faced by patients of all ages. The beginning of her tenure perfectly coincided with someone who shared her enthusiasm for this new direction.

Harris Pastides had arrived at the Arnold School in 1998 – recruited to bring the school into the new millennium with an energy that befitted the growing recognition of the field’s importance in protecting and advancing the health of the masses. Pastides is widely praised for his partnership with Norman J. Arnold, a local businessman who gifted the school $10 million (resulting in its naming in 2000) and then another $7 million in 2016 to establish the Arnold Institute on Aging.  

What is less well known is the way Pastides quietly bolstered the school’s coffers in support of his strategic vision to become a major leader in public health research. First through his start-up package negotiation and later through matching funds when Arnold made his gifts, Pastides’ successful fundraising made recruitment of top-notch faculty possible in a way like never before.

With input from department chairs and other school leaders, physical activity became the primary focus, but every department benefited from the presence of these new resources. They only had to propose a plan and then get to work.

Frank was completely on board with this approach. COMD had a Ph.D. program that needed revamping and a nearly endless array of new research directions to explore. One of their new faculty hires was Julius Fridriksson.

Fridriksson was still completing his dissertation research when he arrived as an assistant professor in 2001 (the same year Varnedoe took on the clinic director role). In the 24 years since then, he and the many other faculty and students who have joined him, have revolutionized aphasia and brain health research not just for the department but for the entire state and the surrounding stroke belt.

“Elaine Frank and Harris Pastides were instrumental in hiring Julius Fridrksson, which changed everything in terms of the populations we served, the faculty and students we attracted, and the research we were conducting,” Varnedoe says. “Our Ph.D. program really blossomed because there was funding to support the students. The COMD field needed us to prepare them to not just be practitioners but to be researchers as well, and we became internationally recognized for it.”

Faculty from a wide array of areas continued to join the school during this period and the ensuing years. For example, the first of a core of language and literacy experts arrived in 2011 and was soon joined by  Kenn Apel, the chair who was recruited to lead the department in 2012 when Frank retired.

The best of both worlds

Apel also shared the school’s dedication to advancing research and was instrumental in integrating the scientific and clinical aspects of his unique department. Working closely with Varnedoe, Apel ensured that master’s students, whom he called “clinical scientists,” and clinical faculty were also engaged in the cutting-edge research happening all over the department – whether that was through contributing to projects or applying the lessons learned in those labs to their clinical work.

“Our students got to see the link between evidence-based research and clinical practice,” Varnedoe says. “This approach also meant we could strengthen clinical protocols. Most clinics could really only follow guidelines from national organizations, but we were able to set up diagnostics and treatment based on research that was happening in our department in real time.”

Apel also solved the single greatest barrier to the department’s ability to optimize such collaborations: geography. Office and lab space were an ongoing strain for growing colleges like the Arnold School when Apel had arrived at USC. At the time, COMD’s academic staff were housed with the College of Nursing, and the clinic was isolated off campus. With support from then-Dean Tom Chandler, Apel moved everyone together into the Keenan building – going so far as to host an annual fundraiser, Something To Talk About, to help pay the off-campus rent. 

The second major milestone in Apel’s determination to bring his department together in one place happened in 2018. Long-time faculty members Al and Marcia Montgomery made a generous lead gift that made it possible to renovate dedicated space within the Close-Hipp Building so that the entire department – faculty, staff, students, and the USC Speech and Hearing Research Center, which was renamed the Montgomery Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic, could all work together in the same space.

Meanwhile, Apel continued to expand the department’s expertise with the addition of new faculty. Researchers specializing in the communication disorders affecting individual with genetic and intellectual/developmental conditions, such as fragile X syndrome, autism, and Down syndrome, began finding their academic homes at the Arnold School.

Since then, and continuing under the leadership of Jean Neils-Strunjas who took on the chair position in 2020, the department has advanced the role of COMD in public health research in SC and across the nation. This includes research in brain health, childhood development and academic success, and the role of hearing as public health concerns. With this goal in mind, the department has welcomed faculty examining other aspects of genetic conditions and intellectual disabilities, stroke and neurobiology, hearing loss, and language and literacy as well as new areas, such as bilingual learning, aging across the lifespan, augmentative alternative communication, and linguistics. 

“Everything started to meld together,” Varnedoe says. “It was this beautiful thing that happened over time, and all the while, we became more involved with the Arnold School as a whole – serving on committees, collaborating across departments, and just making the most of being a COMD department in a school of public health.”  

Varnedoe was a big part of COMD’s growth both within and alongside the Arnold School. She always embraced new approaches to treatment and educating students and credits her clinical faculty partners for the tremendous value and diverse expertise they’ve brought to serving the clients and mentoring master’s students through their impactful work. From bilingual outreach to the cochlear implant program, she is incredibly proud of the work her team has accomplished over the years and was content to pass the director torch to long-time faculty member and alumna Angela McLeod when she retired in 2023.

Varnedoe has been recognized for her work many times over the years. Some of these honors include the Arnold School Faculty Service Award (2013) as well as the DiCarlo Award for Outstanding Clinical Achievement (2004), Frank R. Kleffner Clinical Career Award (2014), Honors of the Association (2016) and Special Recognition Award (2021) – all from the South Carolina Speech-Language-Hearing Association. She is also the recipient of the Distinguished Contribution Award (2019) from the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders.

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