CBR Seminar Series: Jet Vonk
CBR Seminar Series: Jet Vonk, November 17, 2025
Title: Quantifying Language in Dementia through Automated Speech Analysis
Abstract: Language offers a uniquely sensitive window into brain health, yet traditional approaches to its assessment have been manual, slow, and dependent on specialized expertise. This talk will discuss how automated speech and language analysis can quantify subtle linguistic and acoustic changes in aging and dementia, enabling scalable, low-burden tools for early detection, differential diagnosis, and longitudinal monitoring. Drawing from studies in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, including primary progressive aphasia, this talk will illustrate how computational approaches can expand linguistic theory and clinical knowledge into practical, reproducible markers of neurodegeneration.
Bio: Jet Vonk is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Memory and Aging Center of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dual-trained, she earned her first PhD in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences from the City University of New York, specializing in neurolinguistics and cognitive science, and her second PhD in Epidemiology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, specializing in medical statistics. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University and a postdoc in neuroepidemiology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on developing innovative, language-based cognitive tools for early diagnosis and longitudinal monitoring of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. She authored over 50 scientific articles and her contributions have been recognized through several grants, including a Fulbright Scholarship, Dutch Veni Award, and NIH K99/R00 and R01 Awards.