Funding for Doctoral Students | Penn State College of Health and Human Development

The Ph.D. program in CSD usually only admits students we can fund through fellowships, traineeships, and assistantships.

These awards typically come with tuition for fall and spring semesters, a monthly stipend, and health insurance. Summer tuition assistance programs are available to support summer coursework. Details on your offer would be provided at the time of admission.

Available funding for Ph.D students

Department-level funding

Half-time graduate assistantships (GA) based on merit are awarded to full-time Ph.D. students during the first three years of their program, contingent on satisfactory performance. If a student is under-performing in their assistantship, processes will be followed as outlined in the Graduate School Policies. Students on graduate assistantships are required to work 20 hours per week in their assigned research lab.

University-level funding

Additional funding may be available from The Graduate School. Types of support may include assistantships, fellowships, scholarships, etc. Additional student support programs may provide fellowship awards, travel funds, summer tuition assistance, and more.

Funding for specific areas of study

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)

The Penn State AAC Doctoral Leadership Project supports students who are interested in doctoral studies in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The grant, funded by the U.S. Department of Education (grant #H325D220021), is designed to prepare doctoral students for future careers as researchers, university faculty, and leaders in AAC in order to improve outcomes for children with complex communication needs. All students will participate in mentored research and teaching activities, as well as develop their own line of research based on their personal interests.

Visit the AAC website

Linguistic Diversity Across the Lifespan

The NSF Research Traineeship program, “Linguistic diversity across the lifespan: Transforming training to advance human-technology interaction” (LinDiv), is a two-year graduate certificate program that educates a new generation of experts in human-technology interaction who can create technological innovations that benefit a broad range of linguistically and culturally diverse language users of different ages and of different abilities.

Visit the LinDiv website

Outcomes for Individuals with Down Syndrome

A grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) enables a team of researchers to study specific characteristics of individuals with Down syndrome that contribute to swallowing and speech outcomes with the goal of developing interventions tailored to the needs of this population.

Visit the SLS grant website

Evaluating Verbal Communication in Structured Interactions: Theoretical and Clinical Implications

People with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (PALS) have diminished verbal communication abilities that decline due to disease progression and negatively affect quality of life. Current interventions addressing this issue have limited utility in degenerative conditions such as ALS in which the speaker’s abilities continue to decline in spite of intervention. The grant, funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), supports a research program that evaluates the promise of developing new interventions that leverage communicative interactions to improve verbal communication.

Learn more about the grant

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