Martin J. Ball is Hawthorne-BORSF Endowed Professor and Director of the Doris B Hawthorne Center for Special Education and Communicative Disorders in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He founded the journal of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics in 1987 and served as president of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) between 2000 and 2006. He has published widely in the areas of clinical linguistics and Celtic linguistics. He was born in Wales, and worked at Universities in Wales and Northern Ireland before moving to the United States in 2000.