Bilingual Speech Language Pathologist II
Miramar Outpatient Center
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, 
Miami, FL

Dr. Wilma Benitez-Rivera is a bilingual speech-language pathologist at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital where she has served as a Champion to foster an environment where every child, family, and staff member feels valued and supported. She is certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and has been a speech-language pathologist for close to 27 years working with individuals throughout the lifespan in a variety of settings including hospital, skilled nursing facilities, schools, home health and early intervention. Throughout her career, she has worked with the assessment and treatment of children and adults with different disabilities in the areas of language, speech, literacy, and feeding & swallowing skills, as well as in the area of caregiver coaching. She has completed numerous courses related to language and literacy 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 delivered presentations about bilingual and multicultural topics related to communication, literacy, and feeding & swallowing locally and nationally, recently presented at the Assistive Technology Industry Association Conference, and this is her second lecture at a Pediatric Grand Rounds at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. 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 has served 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 and she created and led a feeding & swallowing journal club for speech-language, occupational and physical therapists that focused on reviewing and critiquing scientific literature to provide evidence-based services. In addition, she has mentored speech-language pathologists and has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level.

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 Attention to Commas Strategy for Improving Sentence Comprehension in English Language Learners.” She has also earned certificates in Ethics and Public Policy in the Sciences from the Universidad Autonoma de Queretaro; a certificate in Race, Development and Social Inequality from the Universidade de Sao Paulo and Universidade Federal da Bahia; a certificate in Bilingual Specialist from Howard University and a certificate in Bilingual Speech Language Pathology Extension from Columbia University. She has also earned a Bachelor of Science in Speech-Language Therapy from Albizu University-San Juan campus.