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From: Ann Packman
Date: 18 Oct 2004
Time: 21:55:30 -0500
Remote Name: 129.78.64.100
Rick, you have asked a lot of really interesting questions, and I’m afraid I cannot answer most of them! Hopefully, someone else will contribute here. I can speak, though, from our perspective Down Under at the Australian Stuttering Research Centre (ASRC) at the University of Sydney. We are in effect a self-funding centre and we spend maybe a couple of months a year writing applications for funding so we that we can do research for the rest of the year! It takes a lot of time and effort and the field is very competitive. In Australia external research funds (that is, funding from outside one’s institution) for stuttering come almost entirely from the National Health and Medical Research Council, which is similar to NIH in US. We are fortunate to have been continually funded this way since the inception of the ASRC in 1996. Details of the grants are available on our website, if you are interested: www.fhs.usyd.edu.au. You will see that the funded projects cover all age groups; there is no bias towards early stuttering. We have many other research studies on the go, but funding is needed for substantial projects. Our colleagues in Melbourne received funding for stuttering research recently from a private source, which is a much-welcomed advance in this country. There is not a strong culture of philanthropy in Australia. It is the case here that funding is usually given for proscribed projects and you make a good point that collaborative interdisciplinary team effort is the way of the future. Certainly our university promotes that. I am pleased to be able to report on a project that has been funded recently in Canada, which is a collaboration between the Montreal Fluency Centre and the ASRC. The project will develop telehealth treatments for stuttering. This collaboration was prompted largely by similarities between our two countries—large land mass and small population. We look forward to more collaborations like this in the future.