Sharynne McLeod is a speech-language pathologist and professor of speech and language acquisition at Charles Sturt University, Australia. 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. 

The Australian Newspaper named Professor McLeod as Australia’s Research Field Leader in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 and “best in the world based on the quality, volume and impact of work” in 2019 and 2023. 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 Deputy Chair of the Child Speech committee of the IALP, and Executive Council Member of the Asia Pacific Society for Speech, Language and Hearing. 

Professor McLeod's 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.  She has provided expertise into the children and youth version of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and the Rehabilitation Competency Framework for 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 60 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, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, Viet Nam, UK, US and Zambia.