Wilma Benitez Rivera, PhD, CCC SLP
Bilingual Speech Language Pathologist, Clinical Specialist, Miramar Outpatient Center
DEI Champion
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, Miami, FL

Dr. Wilma Benitez-Rivera is a bilingual speech-language pathologist at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. She is certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). Dr. Benitez-Rivera has served as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Champion at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital and has been a speech-language pathologist for close to 25 years working with individuals throughout their lifespan in a variety of settings including hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, schools, home health and early intervention. Throughout her career, she has worked with the communication and feeding-swallowing skills of children with autism spectrum disorder in areas of assessment, treatment, and parent coaching. She has completed numerous courses related to autism including the Autism Navigator for Early Intervention Providers and she is a certified Hanen Centre clinician, which focuses on training clinicians to teach caregivers to use their daily interactions to develop social, language, and literacy skills. She has presented on bilingual and multicultural topics related to communication, literacy, and feeding-swallowing, both locally and nationally. She has also published about language, feeding difficulties, and the modification of an articulation test to better assess speakers of Salvadoran Spanish. In her current role, she is a Teach Back Champion where she serves as an expert and resource related to improving clinician teaching strategies to deliver quality patient education to eliminate caregiver barriers to learning home programs. Her passion for feeding-swallowing disorders propelled her to attain advanced competencies in this area of expertise. She has established and sustained a feeding-swallowing journal club for speech-language, occupational and physical therapists to review and critique scientific literature to provide evidence-based services. In addition, she has mentored speech-language pathologists and taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
 
Dr. Benitez-Rivera understands the importance of supporting the next generation of speech-language pathologists, and as such, she has served as a mentor through ASHA’s Student to Empowered Clinician Mentoring program since 2011. She has also served as a scholarship reviewer and clinical student supervisor.
 
Dr. Benitez-Rivera earned a Ph.D. and Master of Science from Howard University where she focused on communication sciences & disorders, literacy, and bilingualism. During her doctorate studies, she was awarded the Helen M. Robison Grant from the International Reading Association for her doctoral dissertation “Efficacy of A2C Strategy for Improving Sentence Comprehension in English Language Learners.” She also earned certificates in Ethics and public policy in the sciences from the Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro; Race, development, and social inequality from the Universidade de Sao Paulo and Universidade Federal da Bahia; Bilingual Specialist from Howard University and Bilingual Extension from Columbia University. She also earned a Bachelor of Science in Speech-Language Therapy from Albizu University-San Juan.