Faculty Focus: Dr. Kelly Salmon

The weather in San Diego is pretty much perfect year-round. The ocean, the mountains, the desert, everything is right there. In fact, there’s really no excuse not to spend a lot of time outdoors.

So, after a few years working as a speech-language pathologist at a rehab hospital in Toms River, New Jersey, Kelly Salmon, SLPD, CCC-SLP, BCS-S, CLT-LANA, NDC, now an assistant professor in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) at Salus University, decided a change of scenery was in order.

There was only one problem amid all the Southern California sunshine and outdoor activity: Dr. Salmon is originally from central New Jersey and her entire family lives on the East Coast, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And, after two years of having a perpetual tan, it was time to move back into the same time zone as the people she loved. 

“I originally thought maybe New York City was where I wanted to go, but it’s a little expensive to live there. But another city close by was Philadelphia, and I had not spent too much time there,” said Dr. Salmon, who received her undergraduate degree from Stockton University in South Jersey and her graduate degree from New York University. 

She is a board-certified specialist in swallowing and swallowing disorders; a Lymphology Association of North America certified lymphedema therapist; and is certified in neuromuscular electrical stimulation for dysphagia.

Upon her return from the West Coast, Dr. Salmon secured a position at Einstein Medical Center in North Philly, then transferred within the same system to Jefferson Health, where she was  full-time for 13 years.

During that stretch, Dr. Salmon had also been an adjunct, mostly at Temple University, and started as an adjunct at Salus in 2019. 

“I had the opportunity to teach at Salus and I really enjoyed my experience and I saw a lot of great things that I liked about the program that were different than at other institutions that I had worked for,” she said. “There was an opening for a full-time faculty and I debated in my mind whether I was ready to leave clinical practice for a full-time academic position. But, I decided it was the right time to make that leap and be a part of the team here at Salus. And, I’m really glad that I did.” 

Her start date at Salus was Dec. 1, 2019, just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country. And, that pretty much flipped her approach to teaching upside down, she said.

“To that point, I had only ever been accustomed to teaching students face-to-face in the classroom and not really using any of the online tools, even though those tools always existed,” she said. “I never really took advantage of recording a lecture or having a guest record a lecture. Everything was always done face to face.”

Certainly, that has changed over the past year, as educators and students continue to learn and evolve as they combine virtual teaching with some face-to-face interactions.

So much of what speech-language pathologists do and teach is focused on communication and being able to lay hands on their patients. Things like seeing the structures on the patient’s face and being able to feel the movements of those facial structures when performing  assessments, both in the classroom and in a clinical setting, present some greater challenges now for both patients and SLPs.

“It’s forced me to explore all of the options and the teaching tools,” said Dr. Salmon. “I certainly learned a whole lot more about taking advantage of the tools that already existed and using them in a creative way to ease the students into this new environment when we weren’t able to see each other face to face.”

Dr. Salmon has recently been involved in doing admissions interviews with prospective SLP students, and one of the questions many of them ask are her impressions of the Salus program and what she believes makes the University unique.

“In terms of the overall community, one of the biggest things that attracted me to Salus was that focus on serving the community at large, not just our own immediate community at Salus or in Elkins Park, but also in the city of Philadelphia, within the state and even abroad,” said Dr. Salmon.

Even though the University had to change how it did that in terms of inviting people on campus to participate in support groups or coming to campus for therapy, the mission hasn’t changed throughout the pandemic. Dr. Salmon believes the SLP program has been able to continue serving the community at large and in fact has sought more opportunities to reach out and help others. 

Prior to the pandemic, Dr. Salmon had taken advantage of being closer to her family, visiting with her parents and taking day trips with her sisters to places like the Finger Lakes in New York. A basketball player in college, she also spent a lot of time with the community at her gym in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, and she had started running all distances, including marathons and triathlons. 

Now that the pandemic has continued to drag out, she has converted one of her guest rooms into a personal workout area and has a Peloton bike and treadmill that she’s made part of her daily routine, proudly stating that she hasn’t missed a day of workouts since March 13, 2020, the day the University first closed for the pandemic. 

She and her husband, Bryant, have an eight-year-old son Zachary, and two Boston Terriers, Murphy and Mugsy. In addition to teaching her SLP students at Salus, Dr. Salmon also took up the separate challenge of sharing at-home teaching duties for her son, now in the second grade.

“It’s been quite the adventure,” she said. “I’m endlessly impressed by teachers’ abilities to change everything and students’ abilities to adapt. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but people have been able to make the best of this situation and I think, it’s opened up the doors of teaching styles and methods.”