9 CBR Students Present Their Research Around the World
Featuring interviews with Student Presentations at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language Conference (SNL) in Brisbane, Australia, and the Academy of Aphasia 62nd Annual Meeting in Nara, Japan.
About the conferences
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL), founded in November of 2010, is an NIH-funded non-profit organization whose overarching goal is to foster progress in understanding the neurobiological basis for language via the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. SNL holds an annual scientific meeting that highlights recent research and hosts lively debates on a wide range of topics including the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual, cognitive, motor, and linguistic processes used to produce and to understand language in both children and adults, and drawing on a range of methods from purely behavioral to neurophysiological and neuroanatomical measures, and from neuro-stimulation and neuropsychological approaches to animal models.
This event welcomed CBR undergraduate students Emerson Kropp and Mohammad Dabbagh to present their research alongside their mentors and peers. This year’s conference was held in Brisbane, Australia, where the students were able to travel with the support of the CBR to have the opportunity to discuss with other individuals in the field of the neurobiology of language. Doctoral students Nicole Carvalho and Isaac Falconer also had their posters presented at this conference.
The Academy of Aphasia The Academy of Aphasia was founded in 1962 and has since grown to include more than 180 members from both clinical and research fields and has attracted significant national and international interest. It is an organization made up of researchers who study the language problems of people who have neurological diseases. Some of these researchers also provide clinical services to help people improve their language skills following strokes or other illnesses.
Their annual meeting brings together individuals in the field to present their research, receive feedback, and create discussions with their peers. This year, the 62nd conference took place in Nara, Japan, where Marissa Russel-Miell, Selena (Xinyi) Hu, Kateri Killela, Jadelyn Kurtz, and Swathi Kiran of the CBR attended alongside colleagues of affiliated institutions.
Presentations
PhD student Nicole Carvalho’s poster titled, Functional connectivity in post stroke aphasia during fMRI naturalistic and language tasks, presented the research she conducted alongside her team of members Anne Billot, Isaac Falconer, and Emerson Kropp, overseen by Maria Varkanitsa and Swathi Kiran. Carvalho says that this research “allows for the understanding of how a more naturalistic task demonstrates patterns of functional connectivity and how this can be used to study language processing in PWA”. This work was presented on her behalf at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL) in Brisbane, Australia.
Undergraduate student Mohammad Dabbagh presented his work, Reflection of the Macro-Scale Cortical Gradient in Aphasia, at the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) annual symposium at BU and then at the SNL conference in Brisbane, Australia. He explained that at the UROP event, “I had the chance to discuss my research with faculty members, students, and their families — I learned to discuss my work with a diverse set of backgrounds and interests.” He continued, explaining that at SNL, “my conversations were more focused on the methodological and technical aspects of the project given the type of people who attended the conference (researchers and trainees working in the field of my project). This helped me grasp where my project is situated amidst the broad landscape of aphasia and language research.” Dabbagh’s project initially started with the mentorship of Isaac Falconer, where they discussed the foundation and the scope of the project, then received guidance from Swathi Kiran and Maria Varkanitsa on the abstract submissions, data analysis, and poster presentation. His peers at the CBR also provided feedback on a weekly basis, as the project was often discussed “during MD and research meetings, and specifically offline with Emerson, very much so during the trip to Brisbane.”
Dabbagh elaborated on the focus of his research, “the body of my research sketches the architecture of brain functional organization in people with post-stroke aphasia. Throughout the history of brain mapping research, unified frameworks of brain organization helped in understanding novel brain phenomena. Cortical gradients, a recently developed method that maps brain organization along a continuum, have the potential to disentangle the meaning of the functional changes the brain undergoes after a left hemisphere stroke.”
Fellow Undergraduate Emerson Kropp also presented his work at the SNL conference titled, Using Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction to Identify Lesion Patterns Predictive of Post-Stroke Aphasia Severity. His research presents a new way to quantify lesion data in the brain which better represents holistic changes to neural tissue after strokes. He explained that, “this could improve our understanding of how clinical stroke types differ in terms of their effects on the language network as a whole, and potentially identify certain stroke patterns associated with higher or lower ability to recover language function.” His team consisted of Nicole Carvalho, Isaac Falconer, Anne Billot, and Mohammad Dabbagh, who were involved in collecting data for the MD project which was used in this analysis. Maria Varkanitsa and Swathi Kiran oversaw all of these projects and provided guidance along the way as Kropp worked through this analysis. More information on this project can be found in our recent blog about his work.
PhD Student Marissa Russel-Miell traveled to Nara, Japan, to present her research at the Academy of Aphasia 62nd Annual Meeting. Her work titled, Beyond naming: assessing near and far transfer effects in bilingual aphasia following semantic feature-based treatment, focuses on generalization in therapy to improve overall communication. She explained that, “generalization in therapy is crucial as it extends improvements beyond directly trained items to untrained items and skills, improving overall communication. For bilingual individuals, this includes cross-language generalization, where gains in one language transfer to the other. Our project explored this phenomenon in detail, examining generalization/transfer effects across diverse language skills and both languages in a bilingual cohort.”
The experience and opportunity to present at this meeting was important for Russel-Miell to further develop and discuss her research. She said that, “it was a wonderful experience getting to meet aphasia experts and trainees from all over the world. The topics of talks spanned orthographic processing and disorders in Asian orthographies, to language testing during awake brain surgery, to interventions in real-world clinical settings, so I feel like I learned a lot about areas of the field I hadn’t previously been familiar with.”
CBR Support
Carvalho explained how the CBR supports her research, “CBR provides all the resources needed to conduct an fMRI project. It allows access to hardware and software necessary for project completion but also provides a wide range of expertise offering feedback to improve my project.”
Kropp elaborated that the CBR has provided him with, “invaluable experience and guidance throughout this process. Along with all of the data I have been able to access through the lab, all my coworkers have provided feedback on this project and helped me create a much better final product. The CBR is an amazing place to work and has taught me so much!”
Russel-Miell noted that CBR provides her with “the funding and guidance to engage with all stages of the research project – development of ideas, data collection, analysis, manuscript writing, and dissemination of findings.” As a PhD student these resources are incredibly important to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute to the field as a researcher.
Having the support and opportunity to travel to these conferences to share and discuss their research allows for growth and collaboration, key components of advancing research in the field of brain recovery.
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