Sharynne McLeod, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Children’s Voices Centre at Charles Sturt University in Australia. She is a speech-language pathologist and is renowned for her seminal research foregrounding social justice to enhance equitable participation for children with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN), particularly multilingual children with speech sound disorder. Her transformative research has activated an international focus on communication rights and communication for all aligned with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Sustainable Development Goals. Her expertise, experience, and leadership has been recognised by invitations to present at the United Nations and work with the World Health Organization.

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

She has been named as one of Stanford University-Elsevier’s World’s Top 2% Scientists and is regularly named 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. She has won Editor’s Awards from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing: Speech, the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, and Topics in Language Disorders.

Professor McLeod’s extensive cross-linguistic research has led to a significant advance of knowledge with multilingual children and families, providing English-speaking professionals with integrated knowledge and resources to work in languages that they do not speak. Her Multilingual Children’s Speech website provides access to over 1,300 evidence-based resources in 131 languages and dialects including the validated Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) in 71 languages. A key impact of her decades of work with multilingual children has been to consolidate knowledge of speech acquisition across languages. She has created and researched innovative co-design methodologies for listening to children with SLCN informed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Speech Participation and Activity Assessment–Children (SPAA-C) increases children’s capacity to participate in decision-making and Children Draw Talking methods facilitate incorporation of children’s voice in participatory research. Her research on prevalence, assessment, intervention, and service delivery has moved international practices from a medical model to focussing on functioning and participation.  

She has a legacy of leading teams to undertake ground-breaking impactful international research. She has built world-class research capacity through her generous mentoring of multilingual researchers across the world that has been enhanced by creation of authentic opportunities to publish their work. She founded the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech and worked with 174 authors as the invited editor of The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World. Her current and graduated PhD students include Fulbright and Churchill Fellows who have developed and tested models of children’s communication services with geographically and linguistically diverse and vulnerable children. The majority are the first generation in their families to undertake a research degree, yet their innovative research frequently wins awards and they graduate to hold key professional and research leadership roles.

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. 

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, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, Viet Nam, UK, US and Zambia.