Megan Y. Roberts, PhD, CCC-SLP

Principal Investigator

megan.y.roberts@northwestern.edu

Dr. Megan Roberts, PhD, CCC-SLP, is the principal investigator of the Early Intervention Research Group. Megan is a Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She is a licensed speech-language pathologist with over 10 years of experience working with young children and their families. Megan received her initial clinical training in speech-language pathology from Emerson College (MS, 2005), after which she practiced as a speech-language pathologist at an inclusive preschool and as an early intervention provider for children with developmental delays. This front-line experience with families of children with developmental delays exposed gaps in the current knowledge and motivated her to pursue a doctoral degree at Vanderbilt University (PhD, 2011). Megan joined Northwestern in 2013 and started the Early Intervention Research Group to examine how best to support early language development in young children with developmental delays. Megan believes that every child has an important message to share with the world and that language is best learned during positive interactions between caregivers and children. Her naturalistic approach along with her other job as a mother of two young children has informed her clinical practice and research, both of which focus on parent-mediated interventions for children with hearing loss, children with autism, children with language delays and children living in poverty. Ultimately, she would like to develop individualized early language interventions based on specific child and parent characteristics. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders and the Institute of Education Sciences.