The Team

Cathy is an expert in the neuroanatomy of language processing in healthy and neurologically impaired patients.

Rachel works with the Chief Investigator to ensure successful management of the project, including managing the Patient Team whose work includes neuroimaging and neuropsychological data collection, processing and analysis. She is also leading on preliminary and ongoing work to implement the findings into the clinical environment.

Tae oversees the integrity of the fMRI database. As well as running fMRI data analyses, she is responsible for creating an analysis pipeline, supervising and quality controlling all ongoing fMRI data analyses.

David is a long-term collaborator with expertise in the neural bases of language control and representation in speakers of more than one language.

Howard contributes on the methods side to the PLORAS project. He has expertise on statistical methods and machine learning applied to neuroimaging data. He is particularly interested to make the classifications and predictions arising from machine learning more transparent to carers, clinicians and patients. 

Howard’s appointments straddle psychology, computer science and neuroscience, reflecting his research interests.

Sophie is involved in behavioural and neuroimaging data collection and analysis. Her research focuses on understanding how demographic, lesion, and therapy factors interact with each other to influence language recovery in patients with aphasia.

Storm's main work in PLORAS includes data analysis, preparing research manuscripts, administering language assessments, screening participants and assisting with fMRI scans at our research centre.

Shamima manages recruitment processes and approvals for the study. She is responsible for coordinating our NHS study sites, ensuring ethical research standards are met, information governance and maintaining study documentation. She also leads the collection of functional MRI scan data, which involves accompanying volunteers throughout their scan and processing the data.
 

Hayley is responsible for coordinating neuropsychological and demographic participant data collection (e.g. Patient-Reported Outcome Measures, formal language assessments, patient questionnaires). She manages a small team of Speech and Language Therapists collecting behavioural data. In addition, she is involved in the development and testing of language assessments, including online versions.

Danielle is responsible for the recruitment aspects of the study which involves processing participant information, collecting scan data and liaising with health professionals/research practitioners. As a point of contact for our research network, Danielle also deals with general queries from NHS sites and assists with administrative duties.  

Douglas assists in the collection of (functional) research and (structural) clinical imaging data as well as developing techniques of brain image analysis and overseeing lesion segmentations. His current research focuses on the heterogeneity of lesions responsible for selective repetition impairments.

Ruben assists in the processing of clinical scans, using both manual and semi-automated tools to create lesion segmentations to be used in data analysis. Ruben is also working towards a fully-automated system able to process scans from start to finish, using the integration of software and AI tools.