Pioneering Researcher/Clinician's Work With Children Lives On Through New Support Fund

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- It was the focus of the late Jack Weber's professional life that every child isolated from the world by a speech or communication problem should get the best possible treatment to break down those barriers.

To continue his work, the Jack Weber Graduate Award in Communicative Disorders and Sciences has been established at the University at Buffalo with a $10,000 gift from his wife, Susan Weber. It will provide annual support for a graduate-student research project in child language disorders.

"This fund, and the work that will come out of it, will promote Jack's wish that children get the best possible services for their needs, and that they have a chance to be part of a normal, everyday life," said Judith Duchan, a friend of Weber's who is professor and chair of the UB Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences.

Weber was among the first group of doctoral students to graduate from the department in 1967. While at UB, he broke new ground in diagnosing and treating children's speech disorders and conducted one of the earliest studies of children's problems with pronunciation, showing that such problems are linguistically based. That study shifted views of child language disorders from a medical perspective to a psycholinguistic one.

After graduation, Weber taught at Ithaca College and Northeastern University. He spent the bulk of his career working at research labs and treatment centers in the United States and Canada. At the time of his death in 1997, he was working in Toronto.

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