Postdoctoral researcher

Status

My name is Selma Saad Merouwe, and I am an assistant professor at the Higher Institute of Speech and Language Pathology at Saint-Joseph University of Beirut. I currently work in the institute’s research lab and teach courses including Fluency Disorders, Clinical Decision-Making in Fluency Disorders, Research Methods: Introduction to Research in Speech and Language Therapy, and Research Methods: Scientific Reading and Critical Appraisal. Alongside my academic work, I am a practicing speech-language therapist with 19 years of clinical experience, focusing particularly on stuttering, cluttering, and language disorders.

Research

My research examines stuttering in multilingual contexts, focusing on how linguistic and contextual factors shape disfluency across languages. I seek to understand how variations in language use and proficiency influence the manifestation and perception of disfluencies in both individuals who do and do not stutter. Through macro- and micro-linguistic analyses, I aim to deepen our understanding of stuttering in linguistically diverse populations and to support the development of assessment and intervention practices that are empirically grounded and sensitive to multilingual realities.

Background information

I received my Bachelor’s (2006) and Master’s in Research (2015) in Speech and Language Therapy from Saint-Joseph University of Beirut. In 2018, I became a certified European Stuttering Specialist through the European Stuttering Specialization program. I hold a PhD (2024) in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the University of Turku (Finland) and in Biological and Medical Sciences from Saint-Joseph University. I currently serve as head of the Stuttering Committee at the Lebanese Association of Speech and Language Therapists, as a member of the Practice Committee of the World Stuttering and Cluttering Organization, and as Lebanon’s representative in the International Cluttering Association. I am a native speaker of Slovak, French, Lebanese Arabic, and Modern Standard Arabic, with high professional proficiency in English and basic knowledge of Italian.