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

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, or UL Lafayette, is a coeducational, public research university located in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Acadiana...

.

He founded the journal of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics in 1987 and served as president of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association

International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association

The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association is an international scholarly association dedicated to the study of speech disorders and language disorders. It was founded in 1991. The Association sponsors a biennial conference. The official journal of the Association is...

 (ICPLA) between 2000 and 2006.
He has published widely in the areas of clinical linguistics

Clinical linguistics

Clinical Linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics which involves the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. Clinical linguistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the use of linguistics to describe, analyze, and treat language disabilities...

 and Celtic linguistics

Celtic languages

The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...

.
He was born in Wales, and worked at Universities in Wales and Northern Ireland before moving to the United States in 2000. He holds dual UK-US citizenship.