Biography
I was born in Washington,
D.C. I went to the University of
Virginia for college, and worked at the Mass.
GeneralHospital
in Dr. David Caplan's Neuropsychology Laboratory during my
summers. I graduated in 1995 with a B.A. in Cognitive
Science. I spent a following great couple years in the Institute
of Neuroscience and Bioimaging at the San
Raffaele Hospital, Milan,
Italy working
with Drs. Perani and Cappa. I recommend living in Italy
to everyone. I received my Ph.D. in Cognition, Brain, and
Behavior in the Psychology Department of Harvard University.
My advisor was Prof. Alfonso Caramazza. I did my post-doctoral work in Philadelphia at the Moss Rehab Research Institute and at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Dr. Myrna
Schwartz and Prof. Sharon Thompson-Schill. Philly is also another great place to live. I recently moved further south (Houston) to take an assistant prof position in the psychology department at Rice University.
My research
I use behavioral,
neuropsychological, and neuroimaging methods to understand how speech is
organized in normal speakers, and why speech breaks down in persons with an
acquired language-disorder such as aphasia. For example, by analyzing speech
errors I recently explored processing dynamics in word production. I found that
word production can be slow and error-prone because representations are active,
not inhibited, creating competition during selection of an intended word. Using
both fMRI in normal speakers, and developing new approaches for the analysis of
lesion-deficit relationships, I identified the brain area necessary to resolve
this competition during language production. In current work, I continue to use
a combination of these methods to explore the neuroanatomical and psychological
substrates of multiword production to understand how speech is produced.
