Nina R Benway, MS CCC-SLP, is a doctoral candidate within the Syracuse University Speech Production Lab (Jonathan Preston, PI) where she researches motor-based intervention outcomes in children with speech sound disorders. Nina’s scholarly work leverages her undergraduate training in Linguistics (Acoustic Phonetics) at Cornell University, her graduate clinical training at The College of Saint Rose, and six years of clinical practice as a multidisciplinary team leader, as well as skills in speech signal processing, natural language processing, corpus phonetics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). She is currently working on the three studies of her dissertation: the curation of a 175,000-utterance speech corpus focusing on children with residual speech sound disorders, the engineering of audio classification algorithms for the predictions of speech-language pathologist judgments of rhotic errors, and a clinical trial validation of an AI-tool that fully automates clinical decision making during rhotic speech sound intervention. She is an alumna of the ASHA Leadership Development Program (2016), a recipient of a New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (2021), and a recipient of a Graduate Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work at Syracuse University (2022).