Dr. Adrianna Shembel

The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future.

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“My passion has been understanding ​laryngeal biology and physiology as it relates to voice use, vocal health and voice disorders. At The University of Texas at Dallas, I’m fortunate to work alongside brilliant colleagues and mentor students who are just as driven to explore these questions. My career has spanned clinical voice care, basic science and translational research — each step fueled by the desire to improve outcomes for individuals with voice disorders. UTD provides a unique environment that bridges innovation and collaboration, and I’m proud to be part of a community that values both.”

Dr. Adrianna Shembel studies the larynx in sensorimotor voice disorders, specifically how increased vocal demands affect the larynx, as well as relationships between the larynx and articulatory, respiratory, and neural subsystems in vocal function and dysfunction. She is a licensed speech-language pathologist with a specialty in diagnosing and treating patients with voice and laryngeal disorders. 

Her research topics include the development of novel physiological metrics to study muscle tension and hypercontraction in the laryngeal system, including shear wave elastography, optical flow, laryngoscopic methods, and motion capture techniques and technologies. She investigates the roles of the somatosensory system and paralaryngeal-respiratory vocal motor control in functional voice disorders, as well as the role of central neuromodulation in laryngeal nerve injury and recovery.  

Shembel has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles on voice physiology and laryngeal biology. 

She received substantial funding early in her career from the National Institutes of Health, including a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award and an Early Career Research Award. She has three additional active Research Project grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) in support of her innovative research on central modulation in recurrent laryngeal nerve injury, paralaryngeal-respiratory spatiotemporal patterns in muscle tension dysphonia, and the sensorineural basis of vocal motor control in muscle tension dysphonia. She has received several awards from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and is a recipient of the Audrey Holland Endowed Award from the University of Pittsburgh. 

In 2020, Shembel joined the faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where she is the principal investigator for the Integrative Laryngeal BioPhysiology Lab. She holds a joint appointment at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an assistant professor of otolaryngology – head and neck surgery.  

Shembel completed her postdoctoral training at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where she studied the effects of vocal exercise on the aging laryngeal muscle. She received a doctorate and a Master of Arts in communication science and disorders from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied the effects of increased respiratory drive on laryngeal physiology in aerobic athletes. She earned a Bachelor of Science in communication sciences and disorders, including a minor in theater, dance and music with a voice emphasis, from The Pennsylvania State University.