The Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences is dedicated to serving persons with diseases of the ear, nose, throat, head and neck, and hearing, speech, language and related disorders. As a part of one of the nation’s leading academic health systems, the Center restores health and the ability to communicate to thousands of people every year through patient care, professional education, and clinical research. The Center is comprised of Vanderbilt’s Department of Otolaryngology and Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.

The Center was created in 1997 when the Bill Wilkerson Center, a private hearing and speech clinic, merged with Vanderbilt Medical Center and became the Vanderbilt Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. Partnered with the nationally-ranked Vanderbilt Department of Otolaryngology, the combined departments are known as the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences.

Ground was broken for a state-of-the-art building to house the new Center on the medical center campus in December 2002. The facility is designed to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and research in all of the speech, language and hearing sciences, and otolaryngology specialties. The facility was completed in 2005.