Media Note:

To arrange interviews with Professor Sharynne McLeod, contact Bruce Andrews at Charles Sturt Media on mobile 0418 669 362 or via news@csu.edu.au

Photo: Professor Sharynne McLeod (left) with Charles Sturt University Vice-Chancellor Professor Renée Leon

Professor McLeod’s ‘impact profile’ for the Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences notes:

The Australian newspaper annually profiles the top 250 individuals in fields of research and announces the Field Leader and Lead Institution for each field. Professor McLeod was identified as the ‘World Leader in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology’ in 2019, and Australia’s Research Field Leader in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022. Charles Sturt University was the Lead Institution in 2018 and 2019.

This international achievement reflected her legacy of leading teams to undertake ground-breaking impactful international research into multilingual children’s speech and communication rights and building world-class research capacity.

Her interdisciplinary Speech-Language-Multilingualism team are innovators who have undertaken pioneering international research that changes children’s lives and recognises the resourcefulness and knowledge of others.

Professor McLeod and her team have championed the cause of communication rights, promoted multicultural issues and demonstrated respect and value for differing backgrounds, cultures and languages. Her Multilingual Children’s Speech website has resources in over 60 languages.

Professor McLeod is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, has been an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, and awarded ARC Discovery and Linkage Grants focussing on children's speech.

She was the first international recipient of the Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia.

She is the founding chair of both the Child Speech Committee of the International Association of Communication Sciences (IALP) and the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and was Vice President of the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association for 13 years.

She was founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (Taylor & Francis) (2005-2013) and edited a special issue on communication rights which she presented at the United Nations in 2019.

Professor McLeod 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.

She is on the editorial board of journals including: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics; Child Language Teaching and Therapy; Advances in Communication and Swallowing; and Speech, Language and Hearing.

She is a Board Certified Member of the American Board of Child Language and Language Disorders.

Professor McLeod is a transformative mentor for rural, first-generation, and women scholars, building research capacity and positioning these innovative social science researchers as leaders.

Her students have been awarded with: Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship, Churchill Fellowship, ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA), Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship, Australian Awards Scholarship, Sir Robert Menzies Research Scholarship, NSW/ACT Young Achievers Award for Science Leadership, SCOPUS Young Researcher Award for Humanities and Social Sciences.