Garcia-Salas Receives Advancing Academic-Research Careers Award

Miguel Garcia-Salas' rise to becoming an award-winning researcher is rooted in family.

Growing up, his sister, Samantha, experienced significant speech and language delays. Getting to see how a particularly impactful speech-language pathologist worked with both her and his family steered him down the path of communication sciences and disorders, and he hasn't looked back.

"Watching Samantha make meaningful progress as our family became more actively involved showed me that families can be powerful teachers, facilitators and partners in intervention," he said.

Garcia-Salas recently received an Advancing Academic-Research Careers (AARC) Award from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) to continue the work that he said is still shaped by those family experiences.

The award, given to 10 researchers in the field each year, is designed to strengthen support for early-career faculty members' academic research endeavors.

Garcia-Salas' research focuses on family-centered approaches to supporting children's language and literacy development, particularly for families who face barriers to traditional education and access to services. He said that despite the central role families play in children's language and literacy development, they are not always provided with accessible, practical and supportive resources that help them feel confident in that role.

"The award reinforces that family-centered and community-engaged research is valued and worth investing in," he said. "It allows me to strengthen my skills as an early-career faculty member, learn from experienced mentors and build a stronger foundation for future research and external funding."

The AARC award will provide mentorship, structure and meaningful opportunities over an 18-month period, enabling Garcia-Salas to develop the next phase of his research program. 

He hopes to use the support to create a research and implementation framework for caregiver-mediated literacy supports and develop an online learning program to help caregivers support children as they move from shared reading toward more independent reading.

"This prestigious award is very well deserved," said Steven Wheeler, head of the Department of Communication Disorders and Occupational Therapy. "Not only has Miguel established himself as an outstanding researcher and collaborator, but he has also assembled an exceptional team of mentors to support his success."

Garcia-Salas received his doctorate from Florida State University before joining the U of A in the fall of 2025. He has been named to ASHA's 2026 Article Peer Reviewer Training Program and has also received a 30 Under 30 Rising Literacy Award from the International Literacy Association.

He said pursuing a career as a researcher and faculty member allows him to study important questions, develop practical supports in partnership with families and prepare future professionals to recognize families as essential partners in children's development. One of his long-term goals is to develop accessible language and literacy supports that can reach families across rural, mobile and under-resourced communities.

"Awards like this help me translate that larger vision into concrete projects that can be developed, tested and, eventually, shared more broadly," he said.

Ultimately, he wants his work to equip families with strategies they can use meaningfully and consistently to become powerful partners in their child's learning and development, just as his family did years ago.