Sharynne McLeod, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia specialising in speech and language acquisition. She is a speech-language pathologist and her transformative research has reframed the profession by foregrounding communication rights and social justice, and by enhancing equitable participation for multilingual  children with speech, language and communication needs. She leads a large team to champion diversity and inclusion, aligning with Australia's values of multiculturalism and social harmony. 

She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, and President of the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association. She has been an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, and Elected Board Member of the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP). She has received Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. 

Professor McLeod 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 work” by The Australian Newspaper and has been named as one of Stanford University-Elsevier’s World’s Top 2% Scientists.  She has won Editor’s Awards from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing: Speech (2018), the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (2019), and Topics in Language Disorders (2020).

Professor McLeod is on the editorial board of International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, Child Language Teaching and Therapy, Speech, Language and Hearing, Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, and Advances in Communication and Swallowing. Additionally, she is Co-Chair of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and was the founding Chair of the Child Speech committee of IALP. 

Professor McLeod's research foregrounds the right of everyone (particularly children) to participate fully in society. She has advocated for communication rights at the United Nations and provided expertise to the World Health Organization.  Professor McLeod's research focuses on monolingual and multilingual children's speech acquisition. She also researches the prevalence and impact of childhood speech sound disorders and links this to policy and service delivery issues. Her Multilingual Children’s Speech website has free resources in over 80 languages. 

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