Dr. Shelley L. Velleman, an Apraxia-Kids Professional Advisory Council member, is a professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Vermont. Her work focuses on the speech development in children with pediatric motor speech disorders, especially childhood apraxia of speech. She specializes in neurodevelopmental syndromes including 7q11.23 duplication syndrome, Williams syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, and Down syndrome. She also researched prelinguistic vocalizations, early words, and the early speech development of children learning a variety of languages and dialects. Dr. Velleman’s education includes a linguistics doctorate with a specialization in child phonology and a master’s degree in speech-language pathology. She has been teaching Communication Sciences and Disorders since 1984. She also held full-time clinical positions in pediatric speech-language pathology for six years. She presents at scientific conferences and workshops around the U.S. and the world and has published many articles and three books. She is the co-author of the Language Neutral Assessment of Motor Speech (LAMS) and a Fellow of ASHA and the National Academies of Practice.
Dr. Giang Pham, Ph.D, CCC-SLP, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, San Diego State University, United States
Giang T. Pham, Ph.D. CCC-SLP, is a professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Associate Dean for Research of the College of Health and Human Services at San Diego State University (SDSU) in San Diego, California, USA. Dr. Pham has a clinical background as a speech-language pathologist and has worked in three languages (Vietnamese, Spanish, and English) with children, ages 3 to 10, who have communication disorders. Dr. Pham directs the SDSU Bilingual Development in Context laboratory, and her research is funded by the United States National Institutes of Health to improve the diagnostic accuracy of developmental language disorder for children in Vietnam and for bilinguals in the United States who speak Vietnamese or Spanish as a home language. Dr. Pham publishes in scientific journals including the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. She co-authored a book along with Drs. Kathryn Kohnert and Kerry Ebert entitled Language Disorders in Bilingual Children and Adults, 3rd edition, which applies current research to clinical practice and has been used to train speech-language pathologists working with bilingual populations.