UA News

Hixon revolutionized research in speech-language pathology.

Thomas J. Hixon, a nationally noted speech pathology expert and a former professor and administrator at The University of Arizona, died in Tucson on March 21. He was 69.

Hixon joined the UA in 1976, embarking on a long and distinguished career as a scientist, research director and teacher in the department of speech, language and hearing sciences and as a University administrator.

His primary research interests centered on speech and language disorders caused by diseases of the nervous systems. In the 1970s Hixon pioneered new investigations that linked human respiration and speech, a field that gained him international prominence as well as bringing millions of dollars in grant funding to the UA through the National Institutes of Health.

As a teacher, Hixon mentored students from the graduate and post-doctoral levels at the UA to Head Start and Med Start in rural Arizona, high school minority apprentice programs for Hispanic students in Tucson and continuing education programs for professionals.

His nomination for the 1995 Career Teaching Award at the UA included a letter from a former student: "I believe that ... his instruction is so solid and broad in perspective, that he sets you up for a lifetime of critical thinking, a scholarly attitude and a healthy skepticism toward all explanations that have not been subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that he always demands."

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health, funded the National Center for Neurogenic Communication Disorders, which Hixon began and directed.

The center established the UA as the leader for research on brain-based disorders of communication, such as aphasia, and attracted researchers from neuroscience, bioengineering, prosthetics, robotics and other fields. Hixon's gift for translating scientific findings into understandable clinical applications has been credited with elevating the level of the science and practice of speech-language pathology.

He also used the center to pursue two personal causes. One was Telerounds, a televised teaching network where speech-language pathologists from the U.S. and several countries could present and discuss clinical issues related to patients with communication disorders.

He also developed and distributed materials for addressing clinical needs of minorities and recruiting members of those communities into the discipline.

From 1995 to 2005, Hixon served the UA's central administration as dean of the Graduate College, associate vice president for research, director of Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs and research integrity officer.

All the while he held his faculty positions in speech, language and hearing sciences, director of the Institute of Neurogenic Communication Disorders and head of an NIH-funded laboratory in motor speech disorders.  

During this time he was successful in bringing in nearly $20 million in NIH extramural funding to the campus to support research and training initiatives while maintaining his central administration workload and as director of the Statewide Training Program in Movement Neuroscience, a consortium that included the UA, Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Hixon graduated from what is now Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and earned his master's and doctorate from the University of Iowa. He was a post-doctoral fellow in physiology at Harvard and spent several years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Tucson.

He wrote approximately 100 books and articles including a comprehensive speech science textbook with coauthors Jenny Hoit and Gary Weismer in 2008. He also served as the editor of the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, first in the 1970s, and again several years ago after the publication was renamed the "Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research."

His awards include the Council of Editor's Award for Publication Contributions and Honors of the Association, both from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. In 1991 the Acoustical Society of America published two extensive articles by Hixon and his colleagues in a comprehensive volume of the most significant research in speech production.

In 2005 the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association gave Hixon its Zemlin Award for "outstanding contributions to the broad spectrum of issues concerning speech science."

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