Brittney Astbury was UMaine’s top student in the 2004 graduating class of approximately 1900 students.

A native of the Maine coastal town of Blue Hill, Brittney graduated in May 2004 with a B. A. in Communication Sciences and Disorders and a secondary concentration in Developmental Disabilities.

Brittney is a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Lambda Theta and the Golden Key Honor Society. She recently completed a children’s book, Ty the Turtle, about traumatic brain injury. Brittney currently is enrolled in our department’s graduate program and plans to work as a speech-language pathologist in the State of Maine. Brittney is the second CSD major to be UMaine’s valedictorian in the last 4 years!

Michelle Bourque was our department’s Outstanding Undergraduate Student for 2003-2004.

A native of Topsham, Maine, Michelle is attending graduate school at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions in Boston in order to pursue a Master’s degree focusing on her interests in adult neurogenic disorders and the effects of the aging process on communication. In addition to enjoying her studies in communication disorders, Michelle is an aficionado of the French language and culture and enjoys reading.

Lori Sawlivich Groves was our department’s Outstanding Graduate Student for 2003-2004. Lori Sawlivich Groves received her Bachelor’s degree in CSD at UMaine in 2002 and her Masters in 2004.
In addition to her coursework and clinical practicum experiences, Lori completed a Master’s thesis titled, “Phonological Neighborhood Analysis of Young Children’s Productive Vocabularies,” in which she explored the characteristics of early lexical acquisition in a longitudinal study of four children. Lori will be presenting her research at the 2004 Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in November in Philadelphia. Currently, Lori works as a speech-language pathologist at Griffiths Associates in Lewiston, Maine. She enjoys spending time with friends and snowmobiling in the winter.