Dr. M. Adelaida Restrepo is a professor and chair in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Florida. She is the director of the Bilingual Language and Literacy Laboratory, whose main mission is to identify the best language assessment and intervention practices for bilingual children at risk of academic difficulties. She specializes in oral language and emergent literacy development and in prevention of academic difficulties in bilingual children. She is a bilingual speech-language pathologist and conducts research on the characteristics of bilingual children with typical and atypical language, on improving assessment and interventions of oral language and literacy in children who speak Spanish as their native language or other underrepresented languages in the US.