Michelle Armour is the Program Manager and Founder of the Northwestern Medicine Aphasia Center at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton, Illinois. With 15 years of clinical experience in both inpatient rehabilitation and outpatient settings, she specializes in stroke rehabilitation, particularly focusing on neurogenic communication disorders. In her current role as Program Manager at Northwestern Medicine Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital, Michelle oversees the hospital’s support group programming as well as the hospital’s Aphasia Center. She is a strong advocate for person-centered care and has presented both regionally and nationally on its implementation in clinical settings. Additionally, Michelle has conducted clinical research and published her findings on supportive communication, quality of life, and inpatient rehabilitation for patients with aphasia. Beyond her responsibilities at Marianjoy, she has served as an Adjunct Professor, teaching a graduate aphasia course at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Illinois. Furthermore, Michelle was the founding co-chair of the Aphasia and Other Communication Disorders Task Force at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM).

Jamie H. Azios, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is the Doris B. Hawthorne Endowed Chair in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is a board member of the Aphasia Center of Acadiana, a non-profit organization that offers free therapy services and outreach programs to individuals living with aphasia in south Louisiana. Dr. Azios has 15 years of clinical experience working with people with neurological communication disabilities and has spent several of those years supervising and training graduate students in person-centered models of care. She has published several works that focus on participation-focused therapy for people with aphasia, functional outcomes of aphasia treatment, and the lived experiences of people with aphasia and those closest to them.

Lynne Brady Wagner, MA, CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist and is the Director of the Stroke Program and the Chair of the Ethics Advisory Committee at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a graduate certificate in Healthcare Ethics from Rush University Medical School and was a Disability Ethics Fellow at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. Lynne is a former member of ASHA’s Board of Ethics, was the Ethics Column editor for the Special Interest Group for Swallowing and Swallowing Disorders Newsletter and serves on the Group’s Steering Committee as coordinator. She is an instructor and teaches Healthcare Ethics at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Health Professions. Lynne has numerous publications in peer reviewed journals and has lectured nationally on the topic of ethics and disability. Lynne is also the ethics column editor for the journal, Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation.

Sarah is a Professor and Program Director for the Master’s in Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Wallace also directs the Communication and Cognition Lab (https://www.facebook.com/CommunicationAndCognitionLab). She has over 16 years of experience working with people who have neurogenic communication disorders as well as conducting clinical research and teaching courses in the areas of neurogenic communication disorders and augmentative and alternative communication. Dr. Wallace regularly leads Interprofessional Education learning opportunities and mentors student research projects.

Dr. Archer is an Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the principal investigator of the Interactional Aphasiology Lab. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in introduction to communication disorders, aphasia, and dysphagia.

Sarah Baar is a private practice speech-language pathologist in Grand Rapids, MI. She’s
had the opportunity to work in many settings across the continuum including acute care,
acute rehab, home & community, and outpatient therapy. In 2016, she started the
Honeycomb Speech Therapy website as a way to promote person-centered and functional
therapy ideas and materials for adult rehab. Most recently, she launched the Activity
Studio as a way to share and promote use of participation-focused speech therapy
materials. Those who have attended her speaking events enjoy her practical approach
and tips that the everyday SLP can implement for a functional therapy approach.

Kayla Fouraker, MS CCC-SLP, earned her Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology from Jacksonville University in 2016. She has been with Brooks Rehabilitation since 2016 and has worked full time at the Brooks Rehabilitation Aphasia Center since 2017. She serves as a speech-language pathologist within the Intensive Comprehensive Aphasia Program (ICAP) and also supports the community program. Her clinical focus includes adult language disorders such as aphasia and primary progressive aphasia (PPA), adult apraxia of speech, and cognitive disorders. She also serves as co-chair of the Resource Exchange Committee in Aphasia Access.  Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her son, DJ, her husband, Dylan, and her dog, Dora. Her personal interests include exercise, weightlifting, walking, and music.

David A Greenberg has been President and CEO of The League for People with Disabilities in Baltimore since 2007. The League is a 99-year-old nonprofit serving more than 4,000 individuals annually through social, medical, recreational and educational programing for individuals with all types of disabilities. In 2014, Mr. Greenberg facilitated the merger of the Snyder Center for Aphasia Life Enhancement (SCALE) into The League for People with Disabilities array of programs.

Previously Mr. Greenberg was a vice president at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital responsible for ambulatory services. Mr. Greenberg holds a Master of Business Administration from Loyola University, Baltimore; and a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Nursing from the American University in Washington, D.C. He is a registered nurse in the State of Maryland.

Mr. Greenberg is a Class of 2014 Leadership Maryland, a graduate of the 2011 Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Fellows Program and is a graduate of the 2009 class of Leadership Baltimore County. He is currently a Commissioner on both the (Baltimore City) Mayor’s Commission on Disabilities as well as the Baltimore County Commission on Disabilities. He is a Rotarian and board member of the Rotary Club of Baltimore.

In 2014, Mr. Greenberg was awarded the Daily Record’s Most Admired CEO Award. In January 2022, he was named a “Gamechanger” by Baltimore Magazine. Mr. Greenberg has been a licensed Registered Nurse in Maryland since 1977.

Brooke Hallowell, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, FNAP, ASHA Fellow, is Dean of Health Sciences at Springfield College. A specialist in aphasia, she has been working clinically, teaching future clinicians, and engaging in research on aphasia and related disorders for over 25 years. She is a representative of the World Health Organization’s World Rehabilitation Alliance and chaired the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s International Issues Board and Committee on Ethics in Global Engagement.  She is known for strengths-based advocacy, transnational collaboration, and academic and clinical program development in underserved regions of the world. In addition, she is a recognized pioneer  in the use of eyetracking and pupillometry to study cognitive and linguistic processing in people with and without disabilities. She is the author of Aphasia and other acquired neurogenic language disorders: A guide for clinical excellence, recently published in its second edition. 

Elissa Larkin, MS, CCC-SLP, HEC-C is a Senior Research Speech-Language Pathologist at the Center for Aphasia Research and Treatment and Bioethicist in the Donnelley Ethics Program at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. Elissa’s areas of clinical and scholarly interest include applications of ethical frameworks to promote patient rights and shared-decision making in rehabilitation practice; collaborative, inclusive, and anti-ableist approaches to aphasia-centered research in partnership with individuals with aphasia from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds; ethical considerations for research utilizing novel technologies with people with communication disabilities; and interprofessional education models to increase communication access and equity for all patients. Elissa developed and facilitates a year-long interdisciplinary communication partner training program for staff across a multi-level hospital system, and has delivered online education and national and international presentations about communication access and accommodations for patients with varied communication needs during clinical care and ethics interventions. She received the 2023 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Louis M. DiCarlo Award for Recent Clinical Achievement for her work in communication access education and advocacy. Elissa holds a Master of Science in Communication Disorders with bilingual certification (Spanish) from Arizona State University, and completed advanced training in the Clinical Bioethics Scholars Program at Northwestern Medicine Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities.

Over the past 32 years, Kathryn has co-founded three nonprofits: Adoption Knowledge Affiliates in Austin, Texas (1992), the Aphasia Center of West Texas (2002), and Aphasia Access (2013) where she served as board president in 2015 and 2016. Her passion for improving services for people with aphasia first sprang from her father’s severe expressive aphasia and their need for ongoing, meaningful support. Kathryn was the Aphasia Center West Texas Executive Director for the first 10 years, then Marketing & Development Director, and finally ACWT’s Grants Director responsible for grant research, writing and impact reporting. She is a graduate of the Nonprofit Management Center’s Generations program, and has completed numerous courses in nonprofit management, fundraising, and governance best practices. Kathryn retired from ACWT in 2025. Prior to her father’s stroke, Kathryn co-owned a marketing and graphic design company and was an award-winning portrait artist, capturing the essence of the human spirit in oil, pastel and mixed media.