Swathi Kiran Named Inaugural James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation
Professorship Spans Two Continents and Three Generations
Speech-language and hearing scientist Swathi Kiran has been named the inaugural James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation at Boston University College of Health & Rehabilitation: Sargent College. Spanning two continents and three generations, the professorship was established by a $2.5 million gift from James and Cecilia Tse Ying (’59) of Hong Kong in partnership with their son John, his wife Lisa, and their grandchildren Jay and Kate.
Kiran, Sargent’s associate dean for research, is a pioneer in the study of language processing and communication following brain injury. Director of the BU Aphasia Research Lab, she specializes in treatment for individuals with aphasia – the loss of language after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) – as well as bilingual aphasia and neuroimaging of brain plasticity following stroke.
This unique expertise in the study and treatment of neurolinguistic and neurobiological deficits made her the ideal choice for the first Ying Professorship says Sargent College Dean Christopher Moore. “Dr. Kiran’s capacity to contribute across the range of health care – from discovery of basic mechanisms to practice guidelines to population health – is extraordinary.”
Kiran’s work offers hope for an often-underserved population of TBI and stroke survivors – college students. In 2016, she started the Intensive Cognitive and Communication Rehabilitation (ICCR) Program which combines academic coursework with individual, group, and online speech therapy to address the unique cognitive and linguistic needs of young-adult TBI survivors. ICCR’s novel, intense approach captured the Ying’s attention at a pivotal time.
Seeking experts in neurorehabilitation, John Ying, a private equity partner based in Hong Kong, discovered just how little doctors and neurosurgeons around the world knew about the brain’s ability to recover. “Doctor’s fix bones, repair hearts, and lengthen lifespans,” says Ying. But “they cannot teach you to walk, eat, talk, or think again.”
At a ceremony honoring Kiran, Ying noted the critical role the rehabilitation sciences, and specifically Sargent College, will play in this emerging field. “For the first time in the history of our species, we are in a position to actually go inside the brain and heal things,” he said. “This is an extremely exciting breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms for cognition and higher-order neural processes. And if we have the privilege to do that, we should and must do that.”
Moore commends the Ying family for recognizing the immense need for the College’s burgeoning work in neurorehabilitation research and treatment. “The Yings saw opportunity in the next generation of rehabilitation and recognized the enormous health need and unrealized human potential,” says Moore. “This professorship will allow Sargent College to recruit and retain experts in the field of cognitive rehabilitation, particularly in aphasia, and to advance the broader field of neurorehabilitation.”
Kiran is the co-founder and scientific advisor for The Learning Corporation, which offers personalized web-based rehabilitation tools for brain injury survivors. She has written more than 100 scientific publications in areas including cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, rehabilitation, and bilingualism, and she serves on Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s brain injury task force. In 2013, she was named a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the organization’s high honor.
Kiran notes that, perhaps most importantly, the professorship is an opportunity to help standardize the delivery of rehabilitation. Currently, neurorehabilitation, unlike pharmaceuticals, has no “recommended dose” making it difficult for providers to know just how much therapy, if any, will provide optimal results. Kiran and her research team are working to address that critical question.
“I am optimistic about a future where a brain injury survivor will come to a lab or clinic, and we get a complete neural, language, and social functional profile,” says Kiran. “Using this information, we can predict a person’s recovery profile trajectory and better prescribe the right treatment to the right patient to get better treatment outcomes.”
About the Ying Family
Cecilia Y. C. Tse (’59) attended Boston University in the late 1950s, graduating with a degree in economics. Like her father, an original partner in American International Group in Shanghai, she showed a deep interest in finance and banking, and she went on to become the first female stockbroker in the state of Indiana. It was during her years at BU when she met her husband, James Ying, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
An engineer by training, James was also a businessman who enjoyed working across international borders. This tradition continues with James and Cecilia’s son John, a private equity partner, who has spent his career forging ties between American and Hong Kong business communities. John was a founding partner of The Carlyle Group in Asia and the founder of Peak Capital, a boutique investment firm based in Hong Kong. In addition to their successful business pursuits, the Yings are generous philanthropists both in the US and abroad.