Dr. Saleh Shaalan is an experienced and highly regarded speech and language consultant and one of the pioneers of the profession of Speech and Language Therapy in the region. Dr Saleh has a PhD from University College London (UCL), UK, in psycholinguistics. In his thesis, he investigated the characteristics of language impairment in Gulf-Arabic speaking with Developmental Language Disorder (previously known as SLI: Specific Language Impairment). Dr. Saleh completed his M.Sc. degree and clinical training in speech-language pathology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, (2000).

He is a certified member of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), Speech-Language Audiology Canada (SAC), and Healthcare Professions Council, (HCPC) in (UK).  He is a founding member and former vice president of the Emirates SLP Society.

​Besides his experience in DLD and SLI, Dr. Saleh has extensive experience working with children with autism. His other areas of interest are speech sound disorders, especially childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), bilingualism in individuals with autism, and reading disorders in children. He presented during many regional and international conferences and published scientific papers and chapters on these topics. 

​Dr. Saleh developed a few assessment tools that are widely used in the region and outside the region, such as the Arabic Nonword Repetition Test, the Sentence Comprehension Test, the Arabic Picture Vocabulary Test (APVT), and the Arabic Expressive Language test. He taught courses in speech-language pathology at undergraduate and Master’s level and has presented at international conferences in the US, Canada, UK, UAE, Qatar,  Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and China.