Current Projects

ReadMap

Reading is very difficult for many people after their stroke. This problem is called alexia. In this study, we will look at how reading changes in healthy aging and after stroke. Understanding specific types of reading problems and how people get better over time is the first step toward finding new ways to treat alexia. 

ReadMap is currently enrolling survivors and left hemisphere stroke as well as older adults with no history of stroke.

Participation requires just a few sessions of language testing and an MRI scan.

ReadMap is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD grant R01DC020446).

BUILD

Have you wondered why you didn’t recover from your stroke as well as you’d hoped? Have you wondered why your strengths and weaknesses are so different from other stroke survivors you meet? In BUILD (Brain-based Understanding of Individual Language Differences after stroke), we’re studying whether these differences are due to the nature of your stroke and also the strength of brain structures and connections that were not affected by your stroke. By understanding these “individual differences” in language and the brain, we hope in the future to predict who will recover well and who may need extra help after their stroke. BUILD will also help us understand which brain structures and connections are essential to language and cognitive abilities, such as reading, perceiving speech, and finding and producing words. BUILD will also help us understand how brain plasticity allows reorganization of these functions after injury. Ultimately, we hope that BUILD will guide us toward new targets for brain stimulation treatments that improve language and cognitive abilities after stroke.

BUILD is currently enrolling survivors and left hemisphere stroke as well as older adults with no history of stroke.

Participation requires just a few sessions of language testing and an MRI scan.

BUILD is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD grant R01DC014960).

Neuroimaging Methods Development

Our lab is interested in developing new tools to help us understand how the brain works. We have previously developed tools for meta-analysis of neuroimaging data (Activation Likelihood Estimation, Turkeltaub et al., 2002, 2012), and for multivariate lesion-symptom mapping (DeMarco and Turkeltaub, 2018). We recently developed a method using resting functional MRI data to map functionally anomalous tissue in individuals with stroke (DeMarco and Turkeltaub, 2018).