PhD on neural assessment of aphasia

This is a project in collaboration between the research groups of Experimental Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, department of Neuroscience (PI's Maaike Vandermosten & Tom Francart ) and Brain & Cognition, Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences (PI Céline Gillebert), both part of KU Leuven, Belgium. The research of Maaike Vandermosten focuses on the neurobiological basis of language, using longitudinal designs with neuroimaging and natural speech measures. Tom Francart has vast expertise in EEG neural tracking analyses in diverse patient populations (hearing impaired, CI, aphasia,...). Céline Gillebert focuses on understanding and detecting cognitive deficits in brain injured patients as well as on its neural correlates. The specific expertise of each PI will be combined in this project to guarantee a multidisciplinary supervision of the PhD student. The main affiliation of the PhD student will be the group of Experimental ORL (http://www.kuleuven.be/exporl), which is a strongly multidisciplinary lab, consisting of 35 researchers from a variety of backgrounds (engineering, audiology, medicine, psychology, speech pathology,...). Within the lab, there is expertise in state-of-the-art MRI techniques, multi-channel brain potential recordings (EEG) as well as psychophysical auditory experiments and language tests. We publish our work in world-class scientific journals and regularly present at important international conferences.
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Project

Around 52 people per day suffer a stroke in Belgium, of whom one third is affected by aphasia, an acquired and impactful language disorder. In the acute phase, formal language testing is challenging, due to potential co-morbid cognitive problems, leading to inaccurate diagnoses and predictions. Natural speech assessment is less depended on active cooperation and would be more representative for daily communication. Therefore, in a large-scale longitudinal project in stroke patients (n=600), we will optimize the standard screening protocol by including natural speech production tasks and a more extensive characterization of the lesion. Via data-driven clustering techniques we will define different profiles in the acute phase and test their predictive value in terms of long-term language outcomes. Second, we will examine natural speech reception in a subset of 100 acute stroke patients and neurotypical controls by testing the sensitivity, specificity and predictive value of EEG neural tracking (i.e., an EEG technique that links brain responses to specific acoustic and linguistic features encompassed within the natural story patients listened to). By using natural speech measures, the aim is to provide novel way to diagnose aphasia in a more comprehensive and functionally relevant manner.

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Interested?

For more information please contact Prof. dr. Maaike Vandermosten, tel.: +32 16 32 62 94, mail: maaike.vandermosten@kuleuven.be, or Prof. Dr. Céline Gillebert, tel: +32 16 372704, mail: celine.gillebert@kuleuven.be, or Prof. dr. Tom Francart, tel.: +32 16 379840, mail: tom.francart@med.kuleuven.be. Applications should be submitted through the electronic application system of KU Leuven, providing a motivation letter, full CV (including detailed university study results), and contact information of at least two referees. Applications will be considered on an ongoing basis until a suitable candidate is identified. KU Leuven seeks to foster an environment where all talents can flourish, regardless of gender, age, cultural background, nationality or impairments.

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