Madeline is Professor of Aphasia Rehabilitation and Recovery at City, University of London. She has pursued a career in post-stroke aphasia rehabilitation since 1998, commencing with her doctorate exploring communication and quality of life at the University of Queensland in her native Australia. She moved to City in 2002, and has held a fulltime role across teaching, research, administration and management, and external responsibilities for two decades.

She is connected to stroke and aphasia rehabilitation research nationally and internationally. She has represented the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists on the UK Stroke Forum Organising and Scientific Committees (2020-2023), and is Co-Chair of the international Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (2024-2026).

Professor Cruice’s research interests include the development of novel interventions to optimise functional communication and quality of life for people with aphasia – multilevel discourse interventions, communication partner training, technology-enabled aphasia rehabilitation, communication access and inclusion in stroke research and stroke rehabilitation practice – and working in partnership with human computer interaction design researchers – inclusive data visualisation, inclusive design content in media, and inclusive content creation and curation.

Her research has been funded primarily by the National Institute of Health Research, the Stroke Association, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Dunhill Medical Trust.

Swathi Kiran is the James and Cecelia Ying Professor of Neurorehabilitation in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and the Founding Director for the Center for Brain Recovery at Boston University.  The mission of the Center for Brain Recovery is to study neurological disorders in the brain while focusing on real outcomes for the patient. She has over 140 peer-reviewed papers in these fields and has been funded by NIH and the ASH Foundation.  She is the Board Chair for the Academy of Aphasia, and Board Member for the National Aphasia Association, and the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation. She is the co-founder and scientific advisor for Constant Therapy Health, a software platform for rehabilitation tools after brain injury. Dr. Kiran is also the Director for Strategic Planning Implementation at the Office of the Provost at Boston University.

Dr. Monica I. Norvik is Associate professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, and Associate professor II at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She has been qualified as a speech and language therapist for over 20 years and holds a PhD in clinical linguistics by the University of Oslo. Her main academic interests include clinical approaches to assessment and treatment of multilingual individuals, clinical linguistics, in particular language disorders in (multilingual) adults with aphasia and dementia, and how working with multilingual individuals with aphasia and dementia can inform linguistic theories on multilingual language processing. Norvik is Deputy lead in The Multilingual Aphasia Practices (MAP) group within the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists. She has furthermore been involved in the adaptation of several assessment tools for individuals with aphasia into Norwegian, e.g., the Bilingual Aphasia Test, the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA), and the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT) (within the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists, previously the EU-funded COST Action IS1208).