NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Western Illinois University (WIU) Athletics is pleased to announce that Dr. Amanda Silberer was named WIU's 2025 Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) Outstanding Faculty Award winner. Silberer, who earned her bachelor's degree and master's degree from WIU, has worked at the university since 2002, when she became an audiology clinical supervisor.
The OVC's Outstanding Faculty Commitment to Student Success Awards began in March 2023. The awards were created by the Provosts from each OVC member institution to recognize outstanding faculty at their institutions. Every OVC institution has the opportunity to nominate faculty members with the rank of associate or full-time professor who has been employed at the institution for at least five years. The nomination criteria includes impact on students, consistent professional development, community involvement, institutional service, and contributions made to the department and university, including in areas such as curriculum development. Once nominations are complete, each OVC institution selects one faculty member as the winner.
Of the student-athletes who put forth Dr. Silberer's nomination, one said "Dr. Silberer is one of the kindest humans I have ever met and also one of the most patient ones. She is very inclusive and never fails to share her knowledge and experience with her students. She is very open and considers her students and faculty family. She does her job well and always does it with a smile on her face which makes me believe that this is not a job to her, it's her passion. Dr. Amanda Silberer is the most deserving person for the 2025 WIU OVC Outstanding Faculty Award."
Silberer earned her B.S. in Communication, Sciences, and Disorders (CSD) and her M.S. in Audiology from Western Illinois University, her clinical doctorate in audiology from Arizona School of Health Sciences, and her Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Sciences from the University of Iowa. She currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as well as supervises students in the audiology clinic. In addition, Dr. Silberer provides students opportunities for participating in mass hearing screenings on and off-campus for pediatric and geriatric populations.
Silberer is a hands-on educator invested in the success of WIU students. Dr. Silberer's research interests include cognitive aging, speech perception, and hearing aids. Specifically, identifying amplification needs of listeners with hearing impairment using more ecologically valid speech perception measures. Her previous work has included collecting normative data for a new multimodal speech perception test for adults and children- The Multimodal Lexical Sentence Test (MLST) developed by Karen I. Kirk and colleagues (2010). She then used the MLST to identify the importance of high frequency information with and without visual cues on speech recognition performance of listeners with normal hearing. Dr. Silberer holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence in Audiology (CCC-A) from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA).
