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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwaivers, Emily Kwong here.

And today, we're going to meet Dylan Pruitt, a genetics researcher at Florida State

University in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

And the particular condition Dylan studies, it's been with him most of his life.

I started stuttering around age three throughout elementary school, was in speech therapy.

An estimated one in 100 people have a stutter, according to the National Institute of Health.

That's three million Americans.

But it is still an understudied condition.

Dylan told us that even in college, there wasn't a lot of robust scientific knowledge about stuttering, what causes it, and why some people who start stuttering in childhood eventually stop, while others do not.

I had kind of heard like, oh, there was some new studies that were looking at genetics of stuttering

and reached out to a professor and asked some questions.

And he was like, you know, honestly, this is a very new area.

I don't know a lot about it.

But it's an area that needs a lot more research.

So Dylan decided this was it. This was the research you wanted to pursue. And while it was

frustrating that there were very few answers. It was another way kind of inspiring, realizing

that I could take action and pursue this field of study and really contribute

to the field.

Alongside geneticist Piper B. Loe and her team of researchers at Vanderbilt University, Dylan

...