Alaina Bassett set to end decade-long journey at Barkley Memorial Center with dissertation defense

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Alaina Bassett jokes that she wanted to be a veterinarian but she didn’t want to go to school for eight years. That was 10 years ago, before she began her journey at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she will soon complete her third degree.

Bassett, a Ph.D. candidate in human sciences, will defend her dissertation, “Evaluating Fall Risk Assessment Protocols in the Field of Audiology,” Monday, June 25. Her presentation is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in room 131 of the Barkley Memorial Center on East Campus.

When Bassett, a native of Tracy, California, began looking at colleges, she was focused solely on attending Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Her grandparents and parents had all gone there. But then Bassett did a career finding activity and decided she wanted to be a speech-language pathologist, a major Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo didn’t offer.

“The one thing I wanted to do, they didn’t have there so I started to talk to other people,” Bassett said. “My godfather actually owns a bed and breakfast in Kansas City, and he told me that a lot of his clients were from Lincoln, Nebraska, and they only had really great things to say about the university. So, in my mind, I thought maybe I should look into this a little.”

After doing some research online, she convinced her parents to take her to Lincoln to visit.

“I went to the visit and I fell in love. Everybody was so nice and so friendly, and I felt like I would be taken care of there, like they wanted me as a person, compared to some of the other schools I’d gotten into.”

So, in August 2008, Bassett began her undergraduate program at Nebraska. She remained committed to becoming a speech-language pathologist up until it was time to fill out her applications for graduate school. Then something just didn’t feel right to her.

“I had taken a lot of gerontology courses with the Gerontology Department at Nebraska and I was really getting into geriatric healthcare and working with older adults,” Bassett said. “I enjoyed learning more about the medical system in general and healthcare provisions for older adults. At that point, I think it was the perfect turning point for me to recognize that audiology was maybe the best path for me.”

Rather than applying to graduate programs in speech-language pathology, Bassett applied to four audiology programs and Nebraska made her one of the best offers, so she decided to stay another four years.

Bassett began in the audiology graduate program with no knowledge about vestibular audiology. But, in her first year, she became a graduate assistant for professors Tim and Sherri Jones.

“At that point, Dr. (Sherri) Jones had a grant from East Carolina University that she had brought over that was a vestibular function test for veterans who’d been exposed to blast. So, that next year I spent a lot of time working with the tests and becoming aware of the vestibular tests.”

Eventually, Bassett began attending meetings at the Dizziness and Balance Disorder Lab, led by then-assistant professor Julie Honaker. Through those meetings, Bassett became increasingly intrigued by the vestibular system and its processes.

“Around that same time, Dr. Honaker started to test athletes for the concussion protocol, so I was one of the first students to work on that and it became very clear to me that although I loved audiology for the hearing side, patients with dizziness and unsteadiness were really my niche because of the variety of tests that I can use and how complex the patients are as well.”

Near the end of her Clinical Doctorate in Audiology (Au.D.) program, Bassett began on a track of research with Honaker related to fall risk and fall prevention for her capstone project.

“For my capstone, I was interested in how individuals who have fallen and their caregivers look at balance confidence. So, maybe individuals who have fallen are really confident in their ability to navigate, but the people who look after them perhaps were more protective or had less confidence in their ability to move around. Then I looked at how that impacted their relationship.

“Through that project I realized how complex fall risk actually was, and during the same time, my grandmother had fallen multiple times in her care setting. So, for something that’s so accidental, what can we do to prevent this from happening and to prevent further injury?”

Honaker began putting Bassett on projects related to fall prevention and intervention, including fall prevention practices with older adults with heart failure, older adults in acute care settings, and looking at how exercise influences falls and how fear of falling may influence the areas of the brain that are stimulated in fMRI research.

That research from her capstone set Bassett up for the next step in her academic journey at Nebraska – the Ph.D. program.

“I had this nice exposure to all these different things, so when it came to my dissertation, it became apparent to me that I had to do something in fall prevention because it lines up so well with everything that I’ve done. I really wanted to look at how audiologists respond to fall risk assessment measures and what they use in their clinical practice to be efficient.”

Now that Bassett is set to begin her career as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at the University of Southern California, she hopes to continue with her research in her new clinical setting.

“The pilot study portion can be expanded upon and I can continue to collect on that so I can strengthen those results and see where they lead possibly in the future for developing a protocol. I’d also like to look at the outcomes of the patients that I see for the interventions they receive.”

In addition to being an assistant professor, Bassett will also be the Co-Director of the Multi-Disciplinary Comprehensive Balance Program at USC. In her roles, she will be at USC’s main medical campus in Los Angeles. She will do clinical evaluations, while also having a research appointment that will allow her to continue her research interests.

“It’s a very dynamic group of individuals, which will be helpful because it will allow me to learn more about working in a larger medical setting – what that takes and different types of patients.

“My goals are to grow the program at USC with the skills that I’ve learned at Nebraska,” Bassett said. “The program at every level at Nebraska has actually prepared me very well for what I’m coming into at USC. The experiences I had in my graduate program helped me develop strong clinical skills and the experiences I gained in my Ph.D. not only on the research and statistical side, but also the practice management side when I took over the vestibular lab, allowed me to come into this new role with some background knowledge that maybe I wouldn’t necessarily have had if I was in another program.”

In addition to growing the program at USC, Bassett hopes to eventually contribute to the research literature for dizziness and imbalance, especially in regard to fall prevention. As she looks back on her time at Nebraska, Bassett comments about the number of classes of speech-language pathology students who have come and gone in her 10 years, as well as the fact that she’s been at Nebraska longer than she was in elementary or high school. But she’s grateful for the journey and knows she made the right choice all those years ago.

“The one constant at Nebraska has been the Barkley Center. That’s where I started my first college class, room 131 at 8 a.m. on Monday morning, with Diane Farrand. So, I’ve really grown up in the Barkley Center. I started when I was 17 and now I’ll leave when I’m 27. It’s obviously been an adventure because there are some things along the path that didn’t necessarily go how I had planned. But, it all prepared me for my next position, which is good. It’s been hard, but it’s been fun.”