I studied at Macquarie University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London. I spent 12 years at The University of Sydney and, during that time, was promoted from lecturer through to full professor. In 2020, I moved to Flinders University to take up the role of Dean of Research in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences. My interdisciplinary research program on child development and disability has been continuously funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) since 2007 and I enjoy collaborating with a diverse group of colleagues and organisations from around Australia as well as the UK, Norway, Singapore, US, Italy, The Netherlands, Israel, and China. I have also been a CI/AI funded by NHMRC, Channel 7 Children's Research Foundation, and the Ian Potter Foundation. I have served on on several national and international Boards (Luke Priddis Foundation, Society for Scientific Studies of Reading, and the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia). I have served as an Associate Editor on two journals and serve on the Editorial Boards of an additional 3 journals. I co-edited a book on Communication in Autism and have published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Developmental Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Cognition, Autism, Child Development, Journal of Educational Psychology, Hearing Research, Exceptional Children, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Research in Developmental Disabilities, and Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools.

Joanne is passionate about an interdisciplinary approach to research. Her research on child development and disability focuses on human communication in its many forms and across a variety of languages and cultures. She also works in the area of wellbeing in disadvantaged and marginalised groups, as well as parenting and clinical practice. Her collaborative research program includes behavioural assessment (conducted in a variety of settings including schools, clinics, and in families' homes), efficacy studies of new programs and interventions, survey methods, acoustic analyses of speech, brain imaging (PET, fMRI), neurophysiological recording (EEG), and computational modelling, among other methods. 

Joanne is interested in bringing together diverse research teams and helping individuals, their families, and their communities to flourish.