Marisha Speights, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at North- western University. A speech-language pathologist and pediatric speech scientist, her research focuses on articulatory and acoustic phonetics, child speech production, and early detection of speech disorders. She directs the Pediatric Speech Technologies and Acoustics Research Lab, which uses large-scale speech data, acoustic analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop scalable tools for automated screening and assessment. Her work bridges clinical practice and technology to improve access to speech and language services for young children. She has taught phonetics and pediatric speech sound disorders for over a decade, and her publications in journals such as PLOS Digital Health, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics feature tools for phonetic transcription and automated analysis of child speech.
