International board

Lindsay Pennington

Lindsay Pennington is a speech and language therapist and Reader in Communication Disorders at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focusses on oromotor disorders in childhood and the development of communication by children with cerebral palsy.  Her current and recent work includes trials of parent training programmes for early communication development, intensive therapy on speech intelligibility, and the comparative effects of drooling medications, and the development of classification scales to describe speech and eating and drinking. At this conference Lindsay will share her extensive clinical experience and scientific knowledge on treatment of dysarthria in children with cerebral palsy.

Anja Lowit

Anja Lowit completed her PhD in the Speech Department at Newcastle University in 1997, focusing on acoustic assessment of speech impairment in dysarthria. She joined the Speech and Language Therapy team at Strathclyde University in 1996 and has been actively involved in research and teaching of motor speech disorders, with a particular focus on degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease and hereditary ataxia. She investigates both fundamental questions on underlying neuropathologies and characterizations of acquired speech disorders as well as clinical issues that have direct impact on patient management and wellbeing. Anja has a particular interest in cross-disciplinary research and collaborates widely with colleagues from signal processing and computer science as well as psychology and phonetics, with her research focusing on the development of new clinical techniques on the basis of advances in the theoretical field. At this conference Anja will thoroughly discuss rhytmic disturbances in motor speech disorders.

Simone Knuijt

Simone Knuijt is working as speech-language pathologist and researcher at the Radboud University Medical Center. She is specialized in dysarthria and dysphagia and is the first author of the Radboud Dysarthria Assessments - adults. Simone works at the outpatient clinic of the department of Rehabilitation, where she diagnoses and treats patients of different kinds of departments (neurology, ear nose throat medicine, gastroenterology etc). Besides patient care, she is involved in research and education (both post-graduate and academic). During our motor speech conference Simone will talk about their recent research on muscle characteristics, analyzed by means of ultrasound, and speech in persons with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.