By Mark Onslow
Director, Australian Stuttering Research Centre; Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney

Our field lost another of its founding figures with the passing of Roger Ingham on the 12^th of May 2025. He was born at Adelaide, Australia, in 1941. In 1966 he obtained a Bachelor of Science, and with that background in psychology he worked from 1965–1972 as a counsellor, tutor, and research psychologist at various locations within the University of New South Wales. At that institution he received his PhD in 1972 on the topic of adult stuttering treatment.

He spent nine months as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Communication Disorders, the University of Minnesota. His time there with Richard Martin and Jerry Siegel profoundly influenced the research methods and philosophy of science that shaped his career. From 1973 to 1984 he was Head of the School of Communication Disorders at Cumberland College of Health Sciences in Sydney. From 1984 for the remainder of his career he was at the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, being Department Chair from 1984–1990. Roger’s career accolades included a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971, Member of the Order of Australia in 1982, and the Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2005.

Such accolades were well deserved. Roger was the finest scholar and researcher I have known. During his final years in Sydney before moving to California, he completed his 1984 textbook Stuttering and Behaviour Therapy-Current Status and Empirical Foundations. That extraordinary feat of scholarship documented a time when a growing evidence base had begun to influence our field. Those pages displayed the essence of his career, which was to seamlessly integrate research and scholarship in developing clinical principles and practices to assist those who stutter. His work spanned clinical psychology, epidemiology, treatment methods, treatment evaluation, and neuroscience. I witnessed first-hand much of the work he did with experimental analysis of behaviour. Trained by his mentor Richard Martin at the University of Minnesota, he became a master of that research method. Many learned about science from the master while he did those experiments. They yielded much information that influences many in what they do today in speech clinics.

Those who worked with Roger found a man with a profound and lifelong passion for his work, which could ignite similar passions in others. I am thankful to have been one of those.

Posted May 22, 2025