Kenneth St. Louis, professor emeritus of Communication Sciences and Disorders, was awarded Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association at the ASHA 2023 Convention in Boston on Nov. 17.
He was one of 10 individuals selected to receive ASHA Honors from the Association's 230,000 members. After three years at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, he accepted a position at WVU in 1976.
St. Louis taught courses, supervised students carrying out speech therapy with children and adults with speech or language problems, and served on numerous state, national and international professional and consumer organizations throughout his 50-year career.
His life goal and passion was to better understand and help people who stutter, a speech disorder he overcame.
A recipient of the prestigious WVU Benedum Scholar Award and Heebink WV State Service awards, he has made significant contributions to research in public attitudes toward stuttering, the value of personal stories of stuttering and bringing the related fluency disorder of cluttering to the attention of speech-language pathologists.
Although retired for more than five years, St. Louis still collaborates with hundreds of colleagues in research on public attitudes toward stuttering in dozens of countries around the world.