Kennedy Kehaulani Guess is a certified speech-language pathologist and a doctoral student in the Human Movement Science at The University of North Carolin at Chapel Hill. Kennedy attended the University of Houston where she obtained her master's degree with a thesis on the influence of examiner dialect on a bidialectal Speaker with Aphasia. As a practicing clinician, Kennedy worked in various settings such as outpatient pediatrics, inpatient rehabilitation, and skilled nursing facility. Kennedy was awarded a diversity supplement from the National Institute of Health to serve as a patient coordinator in Dr. Tatiana Schnur’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine.
During her time at Baylor, she collaborated on a publication, presented research on neural recovery of conversational discourse following acute right hemisphere damage and obtained skilled magnetic resonance training. Through her research, Kennedy hopes to emphasize the importance of the role of speech-language pathologists following sports induced concussions and to utilize her experience in neuroimaging to aid in the understanding of physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics that may predict signs of long-term brain damage disorders due to sports induced concussions.