Telephone: | +61 8 6304 2769 |
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Email: | b.armstrong@ecu.edu.au |
Campus: | Joondalup |
Room: | JO21.536 |
ORCID iD: | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4469-1117 |
Professor Elizabeth Armstrong is the Foundation Chair in Speech Pathology.
Professor Elizabeth Armstrong isFoundation Chair in Speech Pathology. Along with a new Speech Pathology teamrecruited to ECU in 2009, Professor Armstrong established a fully accredited undergraduate Speech Pathology program and a postgraduate research program.Prior to coming to ECU, she worked at Macquarie University in Sydney, where she established the first Speech Pathology Masters program in NSW. ProfessorArmstrong worked in the hospital sector as a clinician in Sydney for many years before taking up an academic career, focusing on acute inpatient care as well as longer-term rehabilitation for people with communication disorders afterstroke.
Professor Armstrong’s research isprimarily in the area of aphasia – language difficulty after stroke. Her workincludes the application of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory to the everydaydiscourse of people with aphasia, early intervention strategies, and issuesrelated to communication disorders in Australian Aboriginal populations. Her current projects funded by the NH&MRCinvolve a multi-centre randomised control trial of very early intervention forpeople with aphasia after stroke (“Very Early Rehabilitation of Speech -VERSE”), and an exploration into communication disorders in Aboriginalpeoples in Western Australia (“Missing Voices: An investigation intoacquired communication disorders after stroke and traumatic brain injury inIndigenous Australians”).
Professor Armstrong presents regularly at both national and international speech pathology, linguistics, allied health andmedical conferences and has published widely in the area of aphasia. She has actively collaborated in the field of aphasia research at both national and international levels. She currently leads two large multidisciplinary teams involving extensive community collaboration to ensure research translation. She has built a strong collaborative team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers focusing on this area within Australia. She is currently building an international team from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa which is the first to examine commonalities in Indigenous experiences of brain injury and related services internationally. Professor Armstrong also collaborates with research groups at University of Texas, and University of Helsinki regarding Systemic Functional Linguistic applications to aphasic discourse, and with researchers at University of Witwatersrand on cross-cultural communication. She is also leading a national university Speech Pathology collaboration surrounding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curriculum development.
Professor Armstrong was founding Editor of Advances in Speech Language Pathology, now entitled the International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, has been Guest Editor of the Clinical Aphasiology Conference special issues of the international journal Aphasiology from 2007-2010, Seminars in Speech and Language, Journal of Neurolinguistics, and is on numerous international editorial boards.