At first glance, Angela McLeod’s path to the field of speech pathology might seem direct. Her younger brother was born with a cleft palate, and she remembers tagging along as a young girl to appointments where a therapist would work on her brother’s ability to enunciate.
“He had a lot of extensive surgeries and required speech therapy for most of his childhood,” recalls McLeod, recipient of the 2026 Clinical Practice Teaching Award. “And I had a chance to observe how his speech therapist did magic.”
That early exposure to the field, however, did not lead directly to a career for McLeod, who grew up in Sumter, South Carolina. At first, McLeod — now the director of the Montgomery Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic in the Arnold School of Public Health — only knew that she wanted a career helping people. Following the advice of counselors who suggested a career in healthcare, she majored in biology at Clemson, thinking she might become a doctor or a physical therapist.
Special education class leads to speech-language pathology
That all changed when she took a special education class as an undergraduate. As part of the course, McLeod observed students at a camp program designed for children who had behavioral and emotional difficulties. Among her observations was seeing a nonverbal child with a speech-language pathologist, who was able to use picture communication boards and gestures to interact with the child.
“That experience reminded me of some of my early-life observations of my brother’s therapy, and I believe it was the first concrete step I made regarding the speech-language pathology career choice,” she says.
After earning a BA in biological sciences and a BS in science teaching, McLeod went on for a master’s in communication disorders from Appalachian State University. She then practiced for seven years in multiple settings — an acute care hospital, outpatient rehab, a skilled nursing facility, early intervention, home health, public schools — before earning her doctoral degree in speech-language pathology from the University of South Carolina.
Today, McLeod oversees a far-reaching clinical effort that reflects the university’s broad expertise in communication disorders. The Montgomery Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic in the Close-Hipp Building works with infants all the way up through older adults, and also conducts outreach in schools and communities.
With children, she says, “You might have sound disorders where they’re not properly articulating words, language weakness — maybe poor vocabulary or limited verbal output or comprehension difficulties.” The list goes on: literacy, hearing loss, Down syndrome and other genetic conditions, and more.
“There are so many different things that could go awry that have disrupted their ability to either receive information or express information, and that can also impede their learning trajectory,” McLeod says.
Among the other conditions the clinic works with are aphasia, Parkinson’s, stuttering, voice disorders, stroke and traumatic brain injury.
“Some adults come in, and we can’t identify them as having a communication disorder — but they want communication improvement,” McLeod says. “So we work with them on things like code-switching or accent modification.”
Students gain exposure to range of communication conditions
At the heart of her clinical teaching work is preparing students to work with a wide range of cases. Each fall, the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders welcomes a cohort of about 35 graduate students in the speech-language pathology program. The students go through HIPAA training, observe clinical sessions and begin to receive client assignments from the start.
“In that first semester, they’re taking courses like speech science, advanced speech, sound disorders, preschool language development and research,” she says. “And then they are assigned four or five clients per semester.” Some students work in the Montgomery clinic; others are placed in schools, private practices, medical facilities or other settings.
“Our job here is to provide dedicated mentoring and support to students so that they’re successful.”
The goal is simple: Build up students’ knowledge, confidence and experience in a systematic way that helps them get to the next level. Each clinical encounter, McLeod says, is an opportunity to learn and grow.
“We’re very intentional with controlling the types of experiences they have, correlated with the amount of training they have,” she says. Before working with a client who is stuttering, for example, the goal is that the student will have specialized training on that condition.
“We do mini-intensive short courses for students,” McLeod says. “Our job here is to provide dedicated mentoring and support to students so that they’re successful.”
Founded in 1969, the clinic is part of the Arnold School’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. The department has a deep well of both clinical and research faculty, which provides fertile ground for collaboration — and an excellent learning environment for students. Over a decades-long career, McLeod has seen former students go on to open private practices, win awards for their work in schools and ascend to national positions at advocacy organizations.
For her, it all started from seeing her brother’s struggles — and having a knack for helping him. Today, she says, you would never know that he had struggled with communication as a child. But years ago, McLeod served as an interpreter in the family.
“We played a lot together as younger children,” she says. “It was very hard to understand him — even my mom couldn’t understand him. But we were playmates, so I could just figure it out.”