PhD Students Receive Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award

Sargent speech, language & hearing sciences PhD students Erin Carpenter and Michael Scimeca received the prestigious Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (Parent F31) from the National Institutes of Health.

Erin is a member of the Aphasia Research Laboratory, and her research interests include bilingual and monolingual aphasia rehabilitation, neural plasticity and language recovery, Bilingual Language Control (BLC), cognitive control, and neuroimaging (fNIRS, EEG, fMRI). Erin’s NRSA project will investigate cognitive reserve in bilingual aphasia using fNIRS and EEG. She plans to collect data from monolingual patients with aphasia, bilingual patients with aphasia, and age-matched neurotypical monolinguals and bilinguals who will complete three cognitive control tasks during the fNIRS-EEG recordings. Her goal is to examine behavioral differences and neural differences across the four study groups.

Michael is also a member of the Aphasia Research Laboratory, and his research interests include language recovery in bilingual Aphasia, post-treatment outcomes, psycholinguistic variables impacting language recovery. Michael’s NRSA project focuses on assessment of real-time reading comprehension in bilinguals with aphasia with the goal of improving assessment methods for reading comprehension difficulties in Spanish-English bilinguals with aphasia. He plans to recruit Spanish-English bilinguals with aphasia, Spanish-English adults without aphasia, and monolingual English adults with aphasia for the study. His goal is to study how reading comprehension difficulties can be moderated by word/sentence type and eye tracking can be used to characterize reading comprehension difficulties to supplement clinical assessment and improve our overall understanding of changes in reading ability after a stroke.

This Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award enables promising predoctoral students to obtain individualized, mentored research training from outstanding faculty sponsors while conducting dissertation research in scientific health-related fields relevant to the missions of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers. The mentored research training aims to enhance the individual’s potential to develop into a productive, independent research scientist.