Susan Hilary Colmar is a practising, qualified educational and developmental psychologist, who is the Program Director for School Psychology training at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has more than 35 years experience of working with children and their parents and teachers. Susan has published over 60 books, chapters and articles.
Susan Ebbels is Research and Development Coordinator at Moor House School and honorary lecturer at University College London, UK. She is a speech and language therapist and adviser to the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, UK, on school-aged children with language impairments. She has a particular interest in intervention research and in encouraging speech and language therapists to become more involved in evidence-based practice.
Susan Edwards is Professor Emeritus (University of Reading, UK) and Visiting Professor (University College London, UK) and has over 40 years of clinical experience. She has spent more than 25 years as a researcher investigating acquired and developmental language impairment. During this time, she has also been involved in and led the education of speech and language therapists.
Kristin R Leffel is the Research Coordinator for Project ASPIRE and the Thirty Million Words™ Project at the University of Chicago, USA. Her primary role with the programs is curriculum and intervention development. She joined Dana Suskind in 2009 to help build the programs from ideas into reality. Kristin’s relationships with the families in the programs solidified her passion for working to confront health disparities and promoting the health of socially disenfranchised populations.
Carolyn Letts is a qualified speech and language therapist and a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests include child language acquisition and impairment, especially in bilingual or cross-linguistic contexts, and linguistic assessment of young children.
Michelle MacRoy-Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA. Her research focuses on the relationship between phonological and lexical development in young children who are typically developing, who are late talkers and who have Autism Spectrum Disorders. She is a licensed and certified Speech-Language Pathologist.
Klara Marton is a Professor in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA, and at the College of Special Education, Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. Her research focuses on the relationship between language and cognition, particularly executive functions in monolingual and bilingual individuals, and in clinical populations with different neuro-cognitive disorders, such as specific language impairment, attention deficit disorder, and autism.
Debra Myhill trained as a secondary English teacher and now leads the Secondary PGCE English course at the University of Exeter, UK. Her principal research interests are in the teaching of writing, including students’ composing processes, the relationship between talk and writing and the role of grammar in writing.
Beth M Phillips is an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems at Florida State University and a faculty associate of the Florida Center for Reading Research, USA. Her research interests include language and literacy development in children from backgrounds of poverty and school-based interventions for preschool and elementary children.
Chana Sacks is a Resident in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, USA. She graduated from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, USA, in 2011. Her research interests include healthcare disparities and health policy.
Shannon G Sapolich is a lead research assistant for Dana Suskind’s Project ASPIRE. She is currently completing her master’s at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, USA. Her clinical work and research interests include child development, the social construction of gender, and interventions with socially vulnerable populations.
Richard G Schwartz is a Presidential Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at The Graduate School and the University Center of the City University of New York, USA. He is the director of the Developmental Language Laboratory at the Graduate Center and director of the Language and Hearing Laboratory at The Ear Institute of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, USA. His primary research interests are language processing (sentence processing and lexical access) and related cognitive processes in various populations of children with language impairments.
Blanca Schaefer is a qualified speech and language therapist. In 2009 she joined the project on the re-standardization of the New Reynell Developmental Language Scales. Currently she is working as a postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests include the assessment of spoken and written language skills in mono- and multilingual children.
Valerie L Shafer is a Professor in the PhD Program in Speech and Hearing Sciences at The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, USA. Her research focuses on the neurophysiological basis of speech and language processing. She is also interested in early identification of language disorders, and neurophysiological basis of language processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Sophie Shay received a BS in Biology from Duke University, USA, and an MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, USA; she is currently a resident physician at the University of California – Los Angeles, training in the Head and Neck Surgery Program. Research interests include pediatric otolaryngology and medical education.
Indra Sinka is a qualified teacher and Senior Lecturer at The Open University, UK, and spent 2007–10 as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Education and Language Studies. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of education and linguistics, with a particular interest in child language acquisition and bilingualism.
Dana Suskind is Director of the Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant Program and a Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics in the Section of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Chicago Medicine, USA. Stemming from her work as a cochlear implant surgeon, she created Project ASPIRE to address the disparities in outcomes she noticed with her patients at her clinic on Chicago’s Southside and the Thirty Million Words™ Project, a parent-directed program that aims to address language disparities and the subsequent achievement gap in all young children.
Elizabeth Suskind joined Project ASPIRE in 2011. Her primary focus has been creating multimedia components for the curriculum, along with module development and formative testing. Her research interests include disparities in early language environments and early childhood language acquisition.
Lyra Repplinger received her undergraduate degree in Communication Science and Disorders from Augustana College and her masters degree in deaf education at Illinois State University, USA. Lyra is a deaf educator who provides listening and spoken language instruction for infants, toddler and preschoolers with hearing loss. During the pilot intervention, Lyra was the Co-Director of the University of Chicago’s Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant Program, is currently the Consumer Outreach Manager for MED-EL Corporation.
Annabel Watson is a Lecturer in Language Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter, UK. Her current research interests are in secondary school students’ writing development, with a particular focus on grammar and multimodal texts.
