Larry Burd is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He is the co-principal investigator for the Four State Fetal Alcohol Consortium. Dr. Burd is also director of the North Dakota Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Center and the FAS Clinic.
Contact information: laburd@medicine.nodak.edu
Trent Christensen is an undergraduate student at the University of North Dakota. He works alongside Dr. Burd in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He will be starting medical school in the fall of 2008.
Inge-Marie Eigsti is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who joined the faculty at University of Connecticut following a postdoctoral fellowship in pediatric neuroimaging at Columbia University. Her research addresses a fundamental issue in human cognition: how constraints imposed by brain development and core neurocognitive processes impact on more complex aspects of cognition and learning, with an emphasis on language acquisition. Although most research on language acquisition and neurocognitive processes is based on typically developing learners, Dr. Eigsti studies atypically developing children to better understand the mechanisms of growth and change. She uses several converging approaches to study these issues, including behavioral paradigms and functional MRI. Her work has involved studies of language development in autism and maltreatment, and language creation in typical adults.
Contact information: inge-marie.eigsti@uconn.edu
Julia Festman studied French and German linguistics (University of Bamberg), and received her master's degree from Humboldt University, Berlin. For her master's thesis, she worked on the language policy of the European Union. Her interest in multilingualism brought her to Israel, where she studied in the department of English, focusing on psycholinguistics (Ph.D. thesis on trilingual language production; advisor: Prof. Walters). After a short time working with Prof. Monsell, University of Exeter, England, during which she started to investigate the similarity of multilingual language switching and task switching, she obtained a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a project in cooperation with Prof. Thomas Münte (Institute of Psychology/Neuropsychology, University of Magdeburg) and works currently in a multimethodological project (psycholinguistics, neuropsychological assessment, electrophysiology, transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS], imaging) on control of interference in multilinguals (Russian-Germans) and the relation to executive functions.
Contact information: Julia.Festman@Nat.Uni-Magdeburg.DE
Mira Goral is an associate professor of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at Lehman College, The City University of New York. She completed her BA in Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and her Ph.D. in Neurolinguistics at the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY. Her research interests include multilingualism, aphasia, language attrition, and language and cognition in aging.
Contact information: mira.goral@lehman.cuny.edu
David W. Green completed a Ph.D. in experimental psycholinguistics on sentence processing. A major focus of his research programme since then has been to understand how bilingual speakers control their languages. He has used both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to look at this issue in normal bilinguals and in bilingual patients with aphasia.
Contact information: d.w.green@ucl.ac.uk
Heidi E. Hamilton is professor in the Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in discourse analysis and applications of interactional sociolinguistics. Her research interests focus on issues of language and Alzheimer's disease, language and aging, medical communication, and language learning. Hamilton's books include Conversations with an Alzheimer's Patient (1994), Language and Communication in Old Age: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (1999), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2001, with Schiffrin and Tannen), Linguistics, Language, and the Professions (2002, with Alatis and Tan), Glimmers: A Journey into Alzheimer's Disease (2003), and Doing Foreign Language (2005, with Crane and Bartoshesky). Current book projects include Genetic Counseling as Discourse (with Benkendorf and Prince) and Doing Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines.
Contact information: hamilthe@georgetown.edu
Ching-fen Hsu is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck University of London. She is also affiliated with the Centre for Teacher Education, Huafan University, Taiwan. Dr. Hsu mainly focuses on research into the genetic disorder Williams syndrome. Most of her studies have hitherto been on language since she graduated from the Linguistics Department of Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Her current interests are to explore brain signatures and functions of developmental disorders with event-related potentials and functional MRI in various cognitive domains, including language and face processing.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith is a professorial research fellow at Birkbeck University of London, and was previously head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit, Institute of Child Health, University College London. She obtained her doctorate from Geneva University, where she studied and worked with Piaget. She is a fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Medical Sciences. She was awarded the 1995 BPS Book Award for Beyond Modularity. In 2002 she won the ESF Latsis Prize for Cognitive Sciences. She has honorary doctorates from Louvain and Zhejiang Universities. In 2004, she was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire). In 2006 she occupied the Nico Fridja Chair in Cognitive Science, Amsterdam University. Author of seven books and 200 chapters or articles, as well as booklets for parents on fetal and infant development, her writings have been translated into 17 world languages.
Contact information: a.karmiloff-smith@bbk.ac.uk
Daniel Kempler is a neurolinguist and speech-language pathologist who has conducted research on communication disorders in patients with aphasia and Parkinson's and Alzheimer diseases. He is the author of numerous articles and the book Neurocognitive Disorders in Aging. He is currently professor and chair of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts.
Contact information: daniel_kempler@emerson.edu
Jacob Kerbeshian is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He also works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Altru Hospital. He is board certified in psychiatry and neurology.
Laura L. Murray is an associate professor in Speech and Hearing Sciences, and a core faculty member in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience Programs at Indiana University. Her contributions include approximately 40 research articles in refereed journals, a textbook, and over 80 invited and refereed presentations at national and international conferences in the fields of aphasia, right hemisphere disorders, progressive neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, traumatic brain injury, and normal aging. Her research primarily focuses on expanding traditional conceptualizations of acquired language disorders by extending theoretical and clinical examination and management of these disorders to cognitive domains beyond language.
Contact information: lmurray@indiana.edu
Ellen Bouchard Ryan is professor emerita in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and in the Centre for Gerontological Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She focuses her psychological research on social cognitive aspects of communication and aging, fostering personhood in dementia through communication, and the impact of spirituality on aging well. Working within the communication predicament of aging model, her research highlights communication predicaments experienced by vulnerable older adults with sensory, cognitive, and physical impairments and the roles of empowering communication in fostering personhood and successful aging with a disability.
Contact information: ryaneb@mcmaster.ca
Marie Y. Savundranayagam is an assistant professor in the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research interests maintain an aging and health outcomes perspective. Specifically, her research focuses on dementia-related stressors, including communication problems and their effect on burden for family caregivers. Her research is also on professional caregivers and the impact of communication enhancing strategies on perceptions of long-term care staff and residents. As a Hartford Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar, Marie is currently investigating the impact of a psychoeducational program on spouse or partner caregivers
Contact information: maries@uwm.edu
Jillian M. Schuh is a doctoral student of clinical psychology at the University of Connecticut. She became involved in research on language acquisition in infants as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Currently, her work focuses on the relationship between pragmatic language abilities and cognition. Thus, she is examining narrative development in autism and in children with a history of international adoption. In addition, she is investigating the perception of prosodic information in autism.
Olga Solomon is a research assistant professor in the Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California. She is an applied linguist by training with a background in clinical psychology. Her research offers an ethnographically informed, developmental perspective on how children and teens with autism, both those who are severely impacted and those who are high functioning, engaging in everyday social interaction as members of families, classrooms, and communities. Her current research examines autism in relation to the following topics: narrative and self-making in everyday interaction, organization of participation in educational settings, disparities in healthcare and education, use of technology in schools and at home, and animal-assisted therapy. She was a recipient of a National Academy of Education Post-Doctoral Fellowship to study communicative practices of children with severe autism, and she was Director of the Ethnography of Autism Project at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Contact information: olga.solomon@usc.edu
Elise Wattendorf received her master in Natural Sciences with the specific focus on human anatomy and physiology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She joined the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Basel where she discovered her interest in functional neuroanatomy. For her Ph.D. thesis, she used functional neuroimaging techniques (fMRI) to investigate the neuronal bases of multilingualism with a specific emphasis on effects of age of second language acquisition (advisor: Professor Rager in Fribourg, Switzerland). Although she is still focusing on functional neuroanatomy and language processing, current research led her to investigate olfactory processing in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (University Hospital in Basel, PD Dr. Antje Welge-Lüssen) as well as the relevance of the hypothalamus for different brain systems (University of Fribourg, Prof. Marco Celio).
Contact information: elise.wattendorf@unibas.ch
