BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Janis Oram Cardy has been researching and supporting children and youth who struggle to learn language for over 20 years. Following completion of clinical training at McGill University, she practiced for nine years as a speech-language pathologist at Sickkids Hospital on an interdisciplinary team providing services for children and youth with severe, complex disorders including specific language impairment, learning disability, autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and epilepsy, among many others. Her early clinical and research experiences raised her awareness that children with different diagnostic labels are often difficult to discriminate from a communication perspective, which complicates diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. This clinical and theoretical challenge led her to purse a PhD in Speech-Language Pathology and a post-doctoral Fellowship in Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto, and has been pivotal in shaping her past and current research directions. Dr. Cardy is currently an Associate Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Western Ontario, a Research Affiliate at the National Centre for Audiology, and an Associate Scientist in the Children’s Health Research Institute, and the Brain and Mind Institute, where she studies neural, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings of language development and disorders. She routinely contributes to the evidence base on speech/language characteristics of, and assessment and intervention approaches for, children and youth with a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders, with a focus on autism. She also integrates this knowledge into her delivery of courses on assessment and intervention for developmental language disorders in pediatric populations to students in Western’s graduate professional program in speech-language pathology.