Karla Estrada-Rojas is a New Jersey state licensed and American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) certified bilingual speech language-pathologist. She has almost 20 years of experience in evaluating and treating individuals with language, speech and feeding/swallowing disorders. Karla received her Bachelor of Arts degree in speech language therapy at the University Santa Paula of Costa Rica, her native country. She worked for five years in private practice as well as school-setting, working with adults and children ages 0-21 with multiple disabilities in Costa Rica. She then pursued her master’s degree in speech-language pathology in the United States at Kean University in 2015, and has been working in New Jersey ever since.
Karla is the founder of Embrace Your Speech LLC and has experience working with infants, children, adolescents, and adults in the outpatient, inpatient, and home-based settings. In these settings, she has worked with individuals presenting with autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, apraxia, traumatic brain injury, strokes, oral/pharyngeal dysphagia, behavioral feeding disorders, and various genetic syndromes, among other neurological and developmental disorders impacting speech, language, articulation, fluency and swallowing/feeding skills.
Karla has been trained in the use of Transcranial Photobiomodulation (tPBM) or Red Light Therapy combined with Speech Therapy to improve language, speech, swallowing, and cognitive skills. She has also been trained in Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) to stimulate facial and laryngeal muscles to improve swallowing and speech skills. Additionally, Karla has been trained in an Orofacial Myology Rehabilitation Technique Based on Laryngeal Fixations, and Aquatic speech therapy as novel techniques to achieve more successful outcomes when conventional therapy results are limited. She has also been trained in Therapeutic Interventions in the NICU and Feeding Therapy, a sensory-Motor approach. Karla has been an active member of feeding teams and has diagnosed, evaluated, and treated individuals with oral/pharyngeal dysphagia and behavioral feeding disorders. Additionally, she has experience and feels comfortable working closely with family members and caregivers to ensure parental training is achieved to promote the most successful results.
Karla is passionate about her rewarding career and emphasizes the provision of personalized and high quality care, using novel approaches, to ensure the best results for her patients and their families. As a mother, she believes that using a family-centered approach, that involves constant parent and caregiver training, is the ideal environment to guarantee the most positive and effective outcomes in an individual’s language/feeding skills.
Recognized by New Jersey’s Favorite Kids Doc’s Magazine 2016, 2018, and 2019 https://www.njfamily.com/the-list-of-new-jerseys-favorite-kids-docs-2019/.