Biography

Sharynne McLeod is a speech-language pathologist and distinguished professor of speech and language acquisition at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA), a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, has been an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (IJSLP). She has received Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia. She is President of the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association (ICPLA) and Co-Chair of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech. Previously she has held postision on the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP) and the Asia Pacific Society for Speech, Language and Hearing.

She has co-authored 13 books and over 250 peer reviewed journal articles and chapters focusing on children’s speech acquisition, speech sound disorders, and multilingualism. She is regularly named Australia’s Research Field Leader in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology and Best in the World based on the “quality, volume and impact” of research in the field by The Australian Newspaper. She has won Editors’ Awards from Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing: Speech (2018) and American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (2019). Her Multilingual Children’s Speech website has resources in over 100 languages: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech.

Her research foregrounds the right of everyone (particularly children) to participate fully in society. In 2019, she presented a speech about communication rights at the United Nations in New York. Additionally, Professor McLeod has provided expertise to the World Health Organization.

Professor McLeod has been an invited speaker at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association conventions as well as at conferences and universities in Austria, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, Viet Nam, UK, US and Zambia.