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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, Shortwaver's 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.

...