Dr. Silliman is an ASHA Fellow and Honors recipient, and served as the Editor of LSHSS. Her publications concern academic language proficiency in students with literacy challenges. Her career has always had a clinical focus. When her professional career as a speech pathologist began, her title did not include language and child language was not a major practice area. These omissions disturbed Dr. Silliman because many of the children she treated struggled with oral language development well beyond articulation (the focus at that time) and, certainly, if school age, struggled with learning to read and write. She decided that collaboration was necessary to remedy the situation. Among the collaborative contributions that she prizes the most are modifying the title change while on the ASHA Legislative Council, which added "language" to the professional credential, and serving on the ASHA advocacy group that succeeded after many years in creating the ABCLLD.