Suzanne C. Hopf is Senior Lecturer and Course Lead of the blended online Master of Speech Pathology at Charles Sturt University, Australia. An Australian-Fijian citizen based in Fiji, Suzanne’s publications and presentations describe how the contextually unique barriers and facilitators for supporting people with communication disability are created and reinforced by individual, community, and societal factors. Dr. Hopf’s Communication Capacity Research and Culturally Responsive Teamwork frameworks provide starting points for developing evidence-informed and culturally responsive communication specialist services in unserved areas of the world. 

Suzanne is currently the Course Lead for the blended online Master of Speech Pathology at Charles Sturt University. Suzanne has taught across all speech-language pathology range of practice areas with an interest in developing students' research, interprofessional practice and clinical reasoning skills. Suzanne's teaching is student-centered and she creates learning spaces that maximise learner-teacher-content engagement. She has supervised a number of research students (PhD and 1^st class Honours) students to on-time completion. She creates opportunities to collaborate with her students for publication and conference presentation. Suzanne’s teaching excellence was recognised when the Speech Pathology department won an inaugural 2021 Executive Dean’s Teaching Award for their work “Inspiring, motivating and supporting learning for students from diverse backgrounds through Australia’s first blended online Master of Speech Pathology”. 

Suzanne is passionate about achieving equity in service provision for people with disability internationally. Suzanne's research seeks to better understand how barriers and facilitators for development of services for people with communication disability are created and reinforced by individual, community, and societal factors. Suzanne is committed to being a part of an international network of research practitioners who celebrate individual diversity and believe in sharing knowledge and resources for the greater benefit of all mankind. Suzanne's 2017 PhD 'Supporting Fijian children's communication" provided recommendations for the holistic management of communication disability in Fiji and detailed a four-stage Communication Capacity Research framework for undertaking research with culturally and linguistically diverse people with communication and swallowing disabilities in underserved regions of the world. Current projects focus on description of young Fijian children’s oral and written communication acquisition and development of culturally appropriate interventions for enhancing Fijian children’s oral and written communication skills prior to school entry.