On this episode of The Swallow Your Pride Podcast, I sit down with Nicole Schaen-Heacock, PhD, CCC-SLP, a postdoctoral fellow in the Advanced Fellowship in Geriatrics at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital in Madison, working in Dr. Nicole Rogus-Pulia's swallowing and salivary bioscience lab. Nicole won first place for the New Investigator Award at this year's DRS conference for part of her dissertation on how the timing of swallow-based intervention affects outcomes in a head and neck cancer treatment model. We get into her research, her path from clinician to PhD to postdoc, and a candid conversation about doing hard academic work while raising twin toddlers.