Samantha Shune, PhD, research and clinical interests include the effects of healthy and pathologic aging on swallowing and the mealtime process. Her work focuses on better understanding swallowing in context among healthy older adults and across various clinical populations. Swallowing impairments (dysphagia) result in profound biopsychosocial disability, impacting both the individual with the impairment and their loved ones. Thus, the shared mealtime provides a particularly potent opportunity to address the intricate relationships between social interaction and health-relevant symptoms and outcomes.
By framing swallowing within the broader contexts of eating/mealtime and socialization processes, her work aims to develop more holistic, ecologically valid approaches to managing swallowing- and eating-related impairments that can improve life expectancy and quality of life for individuals and their families.
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