Mst. Sonia Islam Nisha

Sonia Islam Nisha is an assistant professor of Communication Disorders at the University of Dhaka and is currently on study leave to pursue her PhD at the University at Buffalo in the USA. Before starting her PhD, she also served as department head. She studied linguistics at the University of Dhaka and completed her second Master's in Speech Difficulties at the University of Sheffield under the Commonwealth Scholarship in 2019. As a bilingual doctoral researcher in Communicative Disorders and Sciences, she focuses on understanding how children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds acquire language and literacy skills and how sociocultural factors influence this process. Building on this work, her research interests extend to developing assessment and intervention tools for children with language and literacy impairments from diverse backgrounds and to utilizing advanced AI technologies in speech and language services to provide individualized education. Her research methods include Eye-tracking, the visual world paradigm, and other psycholinguistic approaches. Nisha hopes to contribute to the modernization of Bangladesh's primary and secondary education system, particularly in literacy training, curriculum development, disability inclusion, and parents' engagement. She is a member of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association (ASHA) and the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). Research and teaching are her priorities; beyond that, Nisha has a passion for creative writing, with a particular interest in both fiction and non-fiction, including children's picture books.