Georgia Malandraki earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 2008. (Photo provided)
The College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Georgia A. Malandraki as the new head of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, effective January 2026. Dr. Malandraki brings with her an exceptional record of scholarly achievement, clinical innovation and academic leadership that will advance the department’s mission in education, research and service.
Dr. Malandraki succeeds Dr. Pamela Hadley as department head, who was appointed department head in 2020. Dr. Hadley will continue serving as the Charles and Kay Stenberg Endowed Professor in Disability Research.
“Since earning my Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science from Illinois in 2008, I have been fortunate to have a deeply fulfilling career—one that has been profoundly shaped by the training and mentorship I received during my doctoral years,” Malandraki said. “It is an incredible honor to return to my alma mater to serve as head of SHS. As I step into this role, I am beyond humbled and filled with excitement.
“I follow in the footsteps of professor and current head, Dr. Pamela Hadley, whose compassionate leadership and dedication have strengthened the department through growth and challenges, including during the pandemic. I first met Dr. Hadley during my final year as a doctoral student, and her warmth and generosity have left a lasting impression—one she has carried into her impactful tenure as head. I am deeply grateful for her example and the foundation that she, along with her distinguished predecessors, has built. As I take on this role, I do so with humility, gratitude, and a strong commitment to inclusive excellence, innovation, and collaboration. I look forward to working alongside the exceptional SHS faculty, students, and staff, and under the inspiring leadership of AHS Dean Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell, as we continue to advance impactful research, education, and service in the field of communication sciences and disorders at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Go Illini!”
Dr. Malandraki joins the University of Illinois from Purdue University, where she served as a professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, with a courtesy appointment in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. At Purdue, she directed the I-EaT Swallowing Research Laboratory and Clinic and played a pivotal role in interdisciplinary research and education focused on the neural mechanisms of swallowing function.
Dr. Malandraki earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 2008 after earning her master’s at Ohio University and her undergraduate degree from the Technological Educational Institute of Patras, Greece.
An internationally recognized expert in dysphagia, Dr. Malandraki is a certified speech-language pathologist, a board-certified specialist in swallowing and swallowing disorders, and a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). Her groundbreaking work has focused on the development of neurophysiologically driven interventions and telehealth solutions to expand access to care for individuals with swallowing disorders, particularly in underserved populations.
Dr. Malandraki is a founding member of the Purdue CEREBBRAL Center and a faculty associate with the Purdue Center for Aging and the Life Course. Her contributions to the field have earned her numerous accolades, including the NIH NIBIB R21 Trailblazer Award in 2019, the Purdue Early Career Research Achievement Award, and the 2021 ASHA Fellowship. Her team also received the 2021 Editor’s Award from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR), and she was honored with the 2022 Honors of the Indiana Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
In addition to her research accomplishments, Dr. Malandraki is widely respected for her commitment to excellence in teaching. Since joining Purdue in 2014, she has been recognized with eight departmental teaching awards and received the 2018 Patsy J. Mellott Teaching Innovation Award from Purdue’s College of Health and Human Sciences.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Malandraki to the University of Illinois,” said Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell, dean of the College of Applied Health Sciences. “Her visionary leadership, collaborative spirit and unwavering dedication to advancing the science and practice of communication and swallowing disorders make her an ideal choice to lead our Department of Speech and Hearing Science into its next chapter.”
Dr. Pamela Hadley joined the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in AHS in 2007 and has been department head since 2021. A tireless advocate for the groundbreaking work of SHS colleagues past and present, Dr. Hadley somehow found the time for an energetic interview on a sunny September afternoon.
‘We have such a great group of remarkable scientists who are really committed to rigor in their research,’ Department Head Pamela Hadley said. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Q: This year’s deeper dives into the history of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois have been fascinating. Was there anything in any of these explorations that surprised you, even in your role as the department’s head?
A: Oh, absolutely. For example, I didn’t know how instrumental faculty at the University of Illinois had been in the development of the ASHA [American Speech-Language-Hearing Association] journals. The field continues to grapple, even today, with how to disseminate scientific findings.
There also are many discussions about opening up access to science, especially those things that are federally funded by taxpayer dollars. The internet and social media have fundamentally changed the number of options for sharing scientific findings and clinical resources with the public. That’s something that, looking forward, we will continue to work through. With regard to the SHS at 50 stories, it was really important for me to appreciate the role that Illinois faculty had in the development of those early journals at the very beginning.
Q: What are some topics you would have liked to explore for this series if we’d had more time?
A: Something we talked about early on was exploring paradigm shifts in the field. There are individuals from Illinois who were responsible for changing the way in which our field approached clinical practice. Some of those researchers include Dean Emerita Tanya Gallagher and Carol Prutting, who were mentored by Tom Shriner Jr. in the 1970s. Together they were responsible for bringing the pragmatics revolution into the field of speech-language pathology and establishing the subfield of clinical pragmatics, focused on how language is used in conversational interactions.
Another example: Elaine Paden and Ph.D. student Barbara Hodson contributed to a paradigm shift in how we treat young children’s speech-sound disorders. They were instrumental in shifting the field toward treating classes of sounds to improve the intelligibility of young children’s speech more efficiently. That was a huge paradigm shift.
Professor Emerita Adrienne Perlman was an advocate for expanding the speech-language pathology scope of practice to include dysphagia, or swallowing disorders. When I was a clinical student, swallowing wasn’t part of our scope of practice yet! Now it’s such a fundamental aspect of medical SLPs’ role in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities in particular.
Finally, it would have been wonderful to highlight major research projects throughout the history of the department, such as the Illinois International Stuttering Research Project that was led by Professor Emeritus Ehud Yairi.
Q: What’s impressed you the most about the department’s growth and development since you joined the faculty?
A: I’m so impressed with my faculty colleagues. We have such a great group of remarkable scientists who are really committed to rigor in their research. They hold themselves and their students to high standards, and at the same time, they’re just truly wonderful people who’ve been so committed to delivering high-quality instruction through some really unprecedented times. I admire their resilience. I enjoy their company. In short, I’m just really proud to lead this department.
Q: What are some new areas in this field that recent graduates, current students, and students who will join you in the next few years have, or will have, the expertise to address as they move into their careers?
A: Telehealth is a professional area that has really expanded rapidly in the last three years. Prior to COVID-19, students weren’t trained to assess or treat via telehealth at all. It was considered to be an advanced clinical skill and not something that students would be expected to learn until they had years of clinical practice under their belt.
During the stay-at-home mandates, telehealth became a lifeline, and it caused our professional bodies to reconsider whether this was an essential skill that all our students in training needed to have. We also had many research projects that were required to pivot to remote data collection. Students today are far more advanced in their knowledge and skills in this area, and they are better prepared to conduct research and deliver clinical services remotely than prior graduates.
Q: Let’s talk a bit more about the department’s Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Clinic. You’ve referred to it as the “crown jewel” of the department’s community outreach efforts. How would you like to see the clinic evolve?
A: This summer we had a public meeting as part of a follow-up, in-person site visit from our accreditation body, and a number of individuals who received services from our clinic and their family members attended the meeting. They just raved to the site visitors about the services that they were receiving and the impact of those services on their well-being and quality of life. To hear that kind of feedback from the families that we serve just means everything—it’s so essential to what we’re trying to accomplish in terms of our public engagement and outreach, and it’s testimony to how critically important communication skills are to participation in everyday activities. That encapsulates why I’ve referred to the clinic as a “crown jewel.”
I’d really like to see the clinic expand its sphere of influence beyond the Urbana-Champaign community. My dream for the clinic would be for it to be a center of excellence, particularly for families in rural communities that may not have access to state-of-the-science resources in their local communities. Also, it would be my hope that we could bring individuals here for comprehensive assessments and develop the types of support those families might need for ongoing care, and then maintain that contact through telehealth with educators or health care providers in their local communities. I think that that could be really powerful.
Q: We’ve established through these stories that the SHS faculty at Illinois have been pioneers in the research, and they’ve been leaders in their profession since the beginning. Will these stories serve as inspiration for future activities? Where do you think this department can lead your disciplines in the future?
A: I think these stories helped us bring history alive and explored some topics in a more conversational way than reading a review of the history of the department. What I most hope, though, is that these stories provide our students and faculty with a strong sense of where they come from and, really, a deeper appreciation of the fact they’re standing on the shoulders of giants—pioneers who really established the profession and were influential from the beginning.
Where do I think SHS will lead the discipline in the future? I envision SHS faculty and students contributing to innovations in health technology, including the use of that technology to improve treatment options, and evaluating how different design features might promote people’s use of those technologies and what new technologies are desired. Those health technologies could include how we are designing and developing hearing aids, which treatments best fit an individual’s cognitive profiles and communication needs, how we interact with augmentative and alternative communication devices, how we use speech recognition devices, or how we use different kinds of technologies to age in place successfully. Technology has moved really quickly just in the last year. So the next 50 years? It’s hard to imagine where we’ll be!
For more on the 50th anniversary of SHS at Illinois, check out our stories at shs.illinois.edu/shs-50.
Revamped online degrees are expected to expand the accessibility of AHS programs worldwide, reaching new students from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds
RST interim department head Bill Stewart, left, chats with MHA director Lynne Barnes and MPH director Pedro Hallal (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Three master’s programs in the College of Applied Health Sciences are undergoing transformations for the digital age.
After receiving a $2.035 million award from the University of Illinois Investment for Growth program, AHS faculty, administrators and industry partners will collaborate to create online versions of the Master of Public Health and Master of Health Administration degrees. Additionally, the Master of Recreation, Sport and Tourism online degree will be restructured into three specialized programs: recreation and park management, sport management and administration, and tourism and event management.
The revamped online degrees are expected to expand the accessibility of AHS programs worldwide, reaching new students from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds.
“Going global has been a priority of this university for years,” said Pedro Hallal, Alvin M. and Ruth L. Sandall professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health and director of the MPH program. “So now going global is a priority of this program as well.”
The addition of “stackable certificates” across each discipline will attract nontraditional students looking to boost their knowledge as well as mid-career professionals seeking expertise in their chosen industry.
Each program is committed to including new voices in their online instructional material, mainly experienced professionals working in the respective fields.
“It’ll be a nice blend,” said Lynne Barnes, the longtime top Carle Foundation Hospital administrator who was hired as director of the MHA program this fall. “We’ll have professors who really understand the knowledge base of the field, and we’ll also have clinical people who are working in the field doing the teaching, just like we do for the in-person program.”
The creation of new online master’s degree formats will start with collaboration with AHS’ online learning team. The online MPH program and restructured RST online master’s degrees will begin enrolling students in fall 2025; the online MHA program will debut in fall 2026.
“We’re taking the ‘growth’ term very seriously,” said Professor Bill Stewart, interim department head for RST. “This is a long-term investment for us, not just a one-off thing.”
MPH: ‘The perfect storm’ for growth
To populations around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic was a clarion call to the vital importance of public health infrastructure.
The awakening clearly reached young people pondering their life paths: According to data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, applications to public health graduate degree programs increased 40 percent from 2020 to 2021.
“It’s so much easier now to choose a career related to public health,” said KCH Associate Professor Andi Schwingel, who is working alongside Hallal in developing the online coursework.
“Going global has been a priority of this university for years. So now going global is a priority of this program as well.”
Pedro Hallal
HK Professor, director of the MPH program
For the University of Illinois’ MPH program, the decision to create an online program is also a matter of maturity, Hallal said. Four years have elapsed since the program obtained accreditation from the Council on Education for Public Health.
“Some people in your neighborhood will add a security camera, and you don’t think it’s important until your house gets robbed, and then you see, ‘Oh, I needed that camera,’” Hallal said. “I think that is exactly what happened with public health.
“It was the perfect storm for our time to grow.”
The work ahead will be rigorous, with 20-plus courses awaiting development. Faculty plan to work with external partners, such as public health professionals, to create new course content. And it will be suited to the future landscape of public health, Hallal said: How might climate change and global warming transform health needs? How can we address the coexistence of infectious diseases with chronic conditions, like hypertension and diabetes?
A target for the MPH online expansion is the non-traditional student population. The MPH program will offer six certificates: epidemiology, biostatistics, public health, one health, physical activity and health and health promotion.
“It’s the time for us to reach nontraditional students, we feel ready for it,” Schwingel said. “We want to keep the rigor, the quality that we’ve been giving students in their residential program to the online space as well.”
MHA: Making health administration accessible
The MHA program at Illinois is designed to prepare students for leadership in the healthcare industry.
What the MHA program has recently observed, according to KCH Assistant Professor Mina Raj, is an influx of requests for an online equivalent, especially among mid-career healthcare administrators.
“The pandemic has made salient how important the healthcare system is, and how important it is to have administrators who can respond to public health emergencies and other unpredictable situations,” Raj said.
The overriding goal for the online degree is accessibility, Raj said: What material can be packaged into a four-week or eight-week course? The MHA online degree will offer three professional certificates: health finance, healthcare quality and health informatics.
“I think for this group of professionals it’s really about giving them the context and rationale behind why certain decisions are made as administrators or within a healthcare organization, as well as the tools to anticipate the impacts or consequences of various administrative decisions,” Raj said. “We have faculty with different expertise, different professional backgrounds, and everyone is excited to teach these courses.”
The work has already begun for Barnes, who wants to incorporate seasoned industry experts into course content. Barnes came to the university after retiring from a 45-year career at Carle Foundation Hospital.
“I hope to use real clinicians, people doing the work like at Christie Clinic, Carle and OSF Healthcare to be part of the lectures, so that the students who are online, all over the world and all over the United States experience instruction through people who are actually doing the work,” Barnes said.
RST: Degrees for specialized industries
The Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism has been a leader in online education, debuting the first online master’s program in the discipline back in 2008.
But there wasn’t much fanfare, Stewart said. Online degrees were seen as “second-class programs” two decades ago.
“We were there at the beginning of the front to move online learning into a respectable degree process of education,” Stewart said.
Today, recreation, sport and tourism combine for an estimated $90 billion global set of industries. The pandemic resulted in a surge of public interest in leisure time and nature exploration, opening up new opportunities for professionals in the field, Stewart said.
“[RST] is about what we do in our free time to extend who we are and add value to our lives,” Stewart said. “We’ve come to embrace our needs for leisure-time activities in the last two years in ways that enhance our well-being and nurture our souls.”
The upcoming split of the current online master’s program into three tracks is a response to internal and external trends. Enrollment in the online MS in RST has plateaued in recent years, while other institutions have introduced their own online degrees in the discipline.
Online degrees were seen as “second-class programs” two decades ago, but no longer, said Bill Stewart, center. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Meanwhile, the demands of the industry have become more specialized over time.
“There’s still a need for the generalist degree, but because of the growth, we are finding professionals out there who need more help with the specialty,” Stewart said.
Students and mid-career professionals will be able to enroll in a new slate of RST certificates in high-demand topics, including inclusive design, agricultural tourism, sport analytics, e-sport administration, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The department is in the process of searching for a director of the RST online program, Stewart said, while tapping into a vast network of alumni to help develop new course content.
“Our alumni value the friends and faculty they came to know as students and find various ways to give back to the department,” Stewart said. “Many of our alums are leading remarkable careers in contexts related to recreation, sport and tourism; they readily share their expertise through assistance in course development, guest lectures, creating internship opportunities for our current students, and in some cases, teaching classes for us.
“Our students come here because they care about making people feel better, their well-being, their sense of community and health. They want to give back to the community and they want to give back to the department that gave them this path in life.”
The College of Applied Health Sciences boasts a diverse student body in which 33 percent of the students belong to historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and 149 students are from other countries
Jemimah Bakare, right, Emmanuel Dubure and Byron Juma, left, are parts of a growing contingent of Illinois students from Africa (Photo by Michelle Hassel)
The Republic of Ghana has the second-largest population in West Africa. Until recently, Emmanuel Dubure was one of its more than 32 million inhabitants. He said the part of the country where he grew up faces many health challenges, and he wanted to develop the expertise to make a difference. He chose to study in the United States, he said, because “the U.S. has the best educational system at the graduate level and is a hub for research and experts in many fields.”
Dubure aspires to work at the community level to improve health back home. He learned of Illinois on LinkedIn and liked the idea of obtaining his master’s degree in community health from a well-ranked Research 1 university.
“Most importantly, I chose to come here because the College of Applied Health Sciences had faculty doing good research in my area of interest, which is the use of nutrition education to improve health, particularly in relation to chronic conditions,” he said.
Dubure described his experience at Illinois as “amazing” and said he would strongly recommend it to other international students.
“I have met a lot of wonderful people, both students and professors. The environment here is very stimulating and supportive of learning,” he said. “AHS is very multicultural, which gives you an opportunity to learn about different cultures. It also helps you feel at home because you meet other people from your home country.”
A common sense of humanity
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign boasts one of the largest international student populations among public institutions in the United States. According to the university’s Vision 2030 Global Strategy document, the first international students arrived on campus just four years after the university was founded. In 1907, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign became the first university in the nation to create the position of international student advisor, an early recognition of the benefits of worldwide perspectives in education and scholarship.
Marta Schneider, associate director for global communication at Illinois International, said the university’s global strategy puts a high priority on intentional engagement in Global South countries.
“The number of students from the African continent have indeed been increasing, with Nigeria being among the top 10 represented countries at Illinois in 2021 and 2022,” she said. “The university also is committing resources to increasing ties with Latin America and underrepresented parts of Asia.”
Bill Stewart, interim head of the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, thinks encouraging international enrollments is a good idea.
“A world-class university needs a world-class student body to prepare future professionals for careers that will involve advancing relationships across international and cultural boundaries,” he said. “International students elevate class discussions and activities and research programs by sharing insights and cultural values.”
As a result, he adds, domestic students often better understand cultural differences and similarities and reflect on their own cultural heritage. International students can increase understanding of a common sense of humanity.
This has certainly been the case for Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo, associate professor of kinesiology and community health. Her research addresses disparities in the mental health of women and mothers in different racial, ethnic and immigrant groups and the military. In her Laboratory for Emotion and Stress Assessment, she has graduate students from Nigeria, Ethiopia and The Republic of The Gambia. She said the insights that international students provide on perinatal mental health disparities are critical for addressing the diverse needs of mothers not only globally but also within the United States.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a prestigious institution, and I am extremely proud of being a student here. I wouldn’t want other international students to miss out on these crucial opportunities.
MaryEllen Mendy
Doctoral candidate, Community Health
“International students have lived experiences that are valuable when considering risk factors for perinatal mental health, barriers to care and innovative strategies that respect diverse communities’ cultural and linguistic needs,” Lara-Cinisomo said.
Domestic students also benefit from learning, she added, that while public health crises abroad may appear identical to ones in the United States, they may actually involve layers of complex cultural and political systems that aren’t observed here.
One of Lara-Cinisomo’s mentees, Mary Ellen Mendy, hails from the smallest country within mainland Africa, the Republic of The Gambia. Women in The Gambia face many challenges to their physical and mental health. After completing her Ph.D. in community health, Mendy hopes to apply all that she has learned from this program and her Master of Public Health program at the University of Illinois Springfield to making a difference back home.
“The skills I am developing are already paving the way for my future career as a researcher,” Mendy said. “I have received so much training in the Laboratory for Emotion and Stress Assessment lab, which I greatly value.”
Mendy said she already has recommended the program to friends back in The Gambia: “The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a prestigious institution, and I am extremely proud of being a student here. I wouldn’t want other international students to miss out on these crucial opportunities.”
A wholehearted recommendation
Like their domestic colleagues, international students also benefit from the exposure to different cultures. Kenyan student Byron Juma said he has seen the months fly by as he’s grown “leaps and bounds” from his interactions with students from different parts of the world.
“I have taken classes from different departments and appreciated the opportunities to interact with students from diverse academic and social backgrounds and nationalities,” he said. “Such interactions have enriched my academic life and allowed me to view my research from different perspectives. Furthermore, these interactions have allowed me to learn and appreciate other cultures, thus building my emotional and social intelligence.”
Juma, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in recreation, sport and tourism, has researched doping in sport in Africa and Europe. The unique closed-league system and heavy commercialization of sport in the United States offered an exciting new perspective for his research. The possibility of studying with RST Assistant Professor Julian Woolf, one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic, was also enticing.
“I firmly believe that AHS has some of the best faculty in the country,” Juma said. “Getting a degree in the college counts as a prestigious achievement.”
Juma also noted that the outstanding diversity of the student body in AHS, where 33 percent of the students belong to historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and 149 students are from other countries, makes it easy to feel at home. Nigerian student Jemimah Bakare, who is pursuing a master’s degree in community health, agrees.
“The campus’ commitment to diversity and inclusion makes it an attractive choice for an international student,” she said. “The sense of belonging and the opportunities for cultural exchange are enriching aspects of the university experience that I believe are essential for personal growth and academic success.”
Bakare’s interests focus on the management of type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease in older adults. She was drawn to the strong academic and research reputation of the campus and the college as well as the student body diversity.
“The academic rigor and quality of instruction have exceeded my expectations,” she said. “Furthermore, the university’s emphasis on research and practical application of knowledge has provided me with valuable hands-on experiences that will undoubtedly contribute to my future career in community health.”
Because of this combination of academic excellence, diversity and translational research opportunities, Bakare would “wholeheartedly” recommend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the College of Applied Health Sciences to other Nigerian students. In addition, she said, the support services and resources available to international students at the university help to ensure a smooth transition to life in the United States.
