Megan McAuliffe

Megan Jane McAuliffe is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Canterbury, specialising in speech production changes due to neurological injury, disease and ageing.

Academic career
McAuliffe completed a PhD titled An investigation of articulation and speech rate in Parkinson's disease at the University of Queensland. McAuliffe then joined the faculty of the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Canterbury, rising to full professor. As of 2024 she is the Dean of Postgraduate Research and Deputy Vice-Chancellor - Research. McAuliffe is co-director, with Catherine Theys, of the Speech-Language Neuroscience Lab at Canterbury.

McAuliffe's research has been funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, and she has served on the HRC grant assessment committee and on the Canterbury Medical Research Foundation scientific assessment committee. McAuliffe was an editor on the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research from 2017 to 2020.

McAuliffe's research focuses on neurological causes of speech impairment, called dysarthria, and she is particularly interested in comparing speech production and perception during healthy ageing and neurological impairment, such as Parkinson's disease. She has explored how speech production changes due to accent, ageing and neurological disease and injury. She has commented on why people with foreign accent syndrome, who have typically experienced neurological injury or impairment, feel they experience a change of accent.