Professor Suzanne Purdy is Head School of Psychology at the University of Auckland and Principal Investigator in the University of Auckland Centre for Brain Research (CBR) and the Brain Research New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence. Her academic background is in psychology, speech science and audiology and she has research interests in communication disorders, auditory processing, hearing and neurological conditions. Her research includes two largescale studies of hearing and auditory processing in adolescents in the Pacific Islands Families Study and in New Zealand adults in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. Together with her former doctoral students Dr Joan Leung and Dr Rose Kalathottukaren she has investigated auditory and prosody perception in children with hearing loss and children with autism spectrum disorder.