Lesley B. Olswang, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Lesley B. Olswang, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she spent her 38-year academic career. She received her B.S. degree from Northwestern University, her M.S. degree from the University of Illinois, and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington, all in communication sciences and disorders (CSD) with an emphasis on speech-language pathology. Dr. Olswang holds her Certificate of Clinical Competence from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in speech-language pathology. She was made a Fellow of ASHA in 1996 and received the Honors of the Association in 2016.
The overarching theme of Dr. Olswang’s research has been to understand the nature of communication disorders in young children so that interventions can be devised to optimally facilitate change. She has extensive clinical and research experience with children from 7 months through school-age, but most of her work has addressed communication development and disorders of children younger than 3 years of age. Her research with this age group has focused on two specific populations: young nonverbal children with significant disabilities, and toddlers diagnosed with specific language impairment. She has been investigating the efficacy of treatments with these children and their families, particularly attempting to determine readiness factors that will inform intervention planning. These research programs have moved from feasibility studies to randomized control trials using mixed methodologies and have been supported by the University of Washington, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Institutes of Health. In service of these research interests, she was Chair for the Conference on Treatment Efficacy, sponsored by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (ASHF) in 1989. In 2011, she attended the first Global Implementation Science Conference in Washington, D.C. This seminal experience shifted her thinking about clinical research, offering a paradigm for considering efficacy research from the broader perspective of merging research evidence and practice. As a trustee on the Board of ASHF between 2012 and 2018, she participated in the launching of the Summit on Implementation Science in Communication Sciences and Disorders in 2014. She also served as Chair of ASHF’s Program committee, which was responsible for creating the Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Grant Award to support implementation research in CSD. Since 2014, she has continued her work with young nonverbal children with significant disabilities, including being funded by the University of Washington, Institute of Translational Health Sciences to address several implementation questions. Most recently, she has participated in dissemination research as part of her research program. She has given numerous presentations on implementation science in CSD and has authored nine implementation and dissemination research articles.