The Team
Angela Allen is a nationally recognized writer in Portland, Ore., who worked for 25 years as a daily newspaper columnist, reviewer and staffer, and now contributes to Oregon Arts Watch and to Classical Voice North America. With masters degrees in journalism and creative writing, she belongs to the Music Critics Association of North America, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and to various literary associations. For BioSpeech, she writes text materials, especially for assessment of social prosody in children with autism for the Prosody Assessment Toolbox NIH SBIR project.
Kelly is a practicing speech-language pathologist and digital media manager who spends entirely too much time on Twitter every day. She centers both her SLP and digital media work in the biopsychosocial disability model. She is passionate about cultivating and creating content that amplifies the voices of historically underserved populations and those with disabilities.
Alex has been conducting research in the field of digital signal processing for over 17 years, including work on improving the quality and flexibility of text-to-speech systems, detecting sleep apnea, and improving the intelligibility of speech for the hearing- and speaking-impaired.
Kirsty, a speech-language pathologist, helps develop and builds apps for people with communication challenges. She collaboratively works with a diverse team to bring BioSpeech’s innovative apps to market. She is the Principal Investigator for the NIH SBIR projects: the Prosody Assessment Toolbox and Audiobooks for Hearing Loss.
Leslie the rare combination of designer and developer. She has a BS in Multimedia and Web Design and has been working in the field for almost 20 years. She has worked as an award-winning Flash Developer & UI designer making educational lessons for children, a Senior Art Director & Senior Developer at a Portland-based marketing agency and now manages her own creative company doing everything from project management to design to web development.
Cecily is an actor, teacher and voiceover artist with an extensive background in theatrical and vocal performance. For the last 15 years, both teaching and performing, she has worked with a number of theatre companies including: Oregon Children’s Theatre, Portland Center Stage, California Repertory, Profile Theatre, Artists Repertory Theatre and many more. As BioSpeech Voice Director, she recruits, trains, directs and records the voice talent to create the content used for BioSpeech products.
James has a degree in Applied Linguistics and has studied computer programming in a variety of languages and platforms for 25 years. He is passionate about accessibility, language/cultural translation issues, human-computer interaction, and ways in which technology can enhance our lives.
Jenny works as a clinic director for a private practice providing services to children and adults in the Portland area. She has extensive knowledge in the area of telepractice and frequently guest lectures at universities on the topic of telemedicine and telecare. She has worked with multiple teams to develop tools and products that integrate with online services.
Hilary has an M.S. in Art & Design Education from Pratt Institute, a B.A. in Art History from Oberlin College, and a certificate in Digital and Graphic Design from Parsons. She is an Art Teacher at a school for children with language and learning disabilities, and provides graphic design, web development, and UI Design for BioSpeech.
Jan founded BioSpeech in 2004 and has been responsible for a wide variety of projects on technologies for individuals with neurological disorders, both at BioSpeech Inc. and at the Oregon Health & Science University, where he heads the Center for Spoken Language Understanding.
Brandon has a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and has been programming for 10 years. He is passionate about working on software that improves lives and helps society as a whole and has helped unique projects reach successful launches over the years.