Yuchen is a bilingual paediatric speech-language pathologist (Mandarin/English) with over five years of experience working across community, education, and private practice settings in New Zealand and Australia. She has a strong interest in functional, participation-based intervention and takes a neurodiversity-affirming approach to supporting communication.

Yuchen has worked across early intervention, school-aged, and adolescent populations (ages 3–21), supporting children in home, early childhood, school, and clinic environments. She has experience working within Ministry of Education in New Zealand, as well as in specialist school settings, before transitioning to private practice in Australia under the NDIS framework. Her work involves close collaboration with families, educators, and multidisciplinary teams to support functional communication outcomes in everyday contexts. Yuchen is also a Board Member of the Assistive Technology Association New Zealand (ATANZ), contributing to the development and advocacy of assistive technology services.

Interest areas:
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
Supporting minimally speaking and non-speaking autistic individuals
Early intervention
Social communication
Language development
Neurodiversity-affirming practice
Parent and educator coaching
Bilingual communication support

Additional Training/Areas of Practice:
Training and clinical experience across low- to high-tech AAC systems, such as PODD, LAMP Words for Life, Proloquo2Go, Prologue and TouchChat
Hanen certified - It Takes Two to Talk & More Than Words
Routine-Based Intervention (RBI)
Gestalt Language Processing (GLP) – training with Meaningful Speech
Read3 trained
Lidcombe trained

Yuchen is passionate about supporting children to communicate in ways that are meaningful to them. She believes communication is more than speech, and values working with families and teams to build supportive environments where all forms of communication are recognised and respected. Her approach focuses on finding what works best for each individual child, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model, and empowering communication partners to support progress in everyday life.