Christina E. Gildersleeve-Neumann, PhD, CCC-SLP, ASHA Fellow, is Professor and Department Chair in the Speech and Hearing Sciences Department at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She first fell in love with phonetics when she was an undergraduate majoring in German, discovering how a set of symbols could capture the spoken similarities and differences between the many languages she was dabbling in then. This fascination with sound carried her through a first career in international education, later becoming her focus as a graduate student discovering the field of communication sciences and disorders. She has now spent 27 years as a speech-language pathologist and 23 years as a professor, focusing her research, clinical, and academic expertise on speech sound development and disorders in monolingual and bilingual children. The first class she ever taught was phonetics, and it remains her favorite to this day.
