Ellen-Marie Silverman

Ellen-Marie Silverman, Ph.D., Fellow of the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association, was Director of the Fluency Clinic at Marquette University. She holds the Ph.D. in speech pathology from the University of Iowa, and was a post-doctoral fellow in developmental psycholinguistics at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She later trained as a Transactional Analysis counselor. Dr Silverman, a speech pathologist for more than 40 years, has been a member of several university faculties. More recently, she has been CEO and COO of TSS, Inc., a healthcare staffing support service she founded through which she pioneered open captioning for live theater. Dr. Silverman has been practicing shamatha-vipassana mindfulness meditation since 1996. In 2003, she recognized that the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Shenpa, the sense we can have of feeling hooked and our habitual desire to flee the experience, described the development and persistence of her stuttering problem and of clients she has known. Incorporating shenpa work into her shamatha-vipassana mindfulness meditation practice along with the mindfulness practices of maitri, lojong, the recitation of gathas, and tonglen then applying these strategies to her stuttering problem has helped her speak with increasing ease, confidence, and satisfaction. Dr. Silverman has presented nationally and internationally to colleagues and students about the nature, prevention, and treatment of stuttering problems. She has shared her experience applying mindfulness to stuttering at several International Stuttering Awareness Day Online Conferences for people who have stuttering problems and for professionals, students-in-training, and people interested in stuttering. The recipient of research awards, Dr. Silverman has published extensively in peer-reviewed publications, contributed chapters to textbooks, and authored a textbook on clinical practice, "Mind Matters. Setting the Stage for Satisfying Clinical Service. A Personal Essay." She wrote The Jason Loring Trilogy, which began with "Jason's Secret," a novel for readers from 9 to 12, about a 10 year-old boy taking his first steps to constructively resolve his stuttering problem and was followed by "winning: a novel" in which he is 13/14 and concludes with "SheGate" in which he is 50.