Rate My Professor Catherine Theys

Professor Catherine Theys serves as Professor in the School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing within the Faculty of Science at the University of Canterbury, a position to which she was promoted in 2025. She earned her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium. With more than ten years of teaching in the University's Speech and Language Pathology programmes, she received the National Teaching Excellence Award in 2025. Her teaching employs diverse strategies including authentic assessments, bicultural practices, and active learning such as developing community resources on neurogenic communication disorders and clinical case studies at the University of Otago's pathology museum. As Programme Director of the Master of Speech and Language Pathology, she realigned courses to Te Poutama guidelines, enhancing retention, especially for Māori and Pasifika postgraduate students. She mentors new lecturers and postgraduate researchers, fostering their development as innovative scholars.

Catherine Theys specializes in speech production, developmental and acquired stuttering, neuroplasticity in preschool stuttering treatment, motor speech disorders, and audio-visual-tactile integration in speech perception, employing neuroimaging and EEG methods. Notable publications include 'Localization of stuttering based on causal brain lesions' (Brain, 2024), identifying a stuttering-related brain network; 'Acquired Stuttering in Parkinson's Disease' (2023); and 'Hearing, seeing, and feeling speech: the neurophysiological correlates of trimodal speech perception enhancement' (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2023). Her research garners over 850 citations on Google Scholar. She has obtained Marsden Fund support for mapping brain changes in stuttering therapy, NZILBB grants, and Canterbury Medical Research Foundation funding. Active in the UC Speech Lab, Child Language Research Group, and New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain & Behaviour, she supervises PhD students and contributes to advancing speech pathology knowledge.