Maya Henry
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Speech and language are what let people connect with one another, and both depend on brain circuits that can develop, and can also break down. These two projects study spoken language at opposite ends of life.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
primary progressive aphasia
frontotemporal dementia
Alzheimer's disease
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate whether Multi-PA telerehabilitation, which combines restorative language therapy, compensatory strategies and care-partner training, is feasible and acceptable in a randomized pilot of 30 people with PPA and 30 care partners.
- Assess which outcome measures, including patient-reported quality-of-life ratings and performance tests, suit Latino and non-Latino participants with PPA, and gather early treatment-response patterns to plan an efficacy trial.
- Determine how the posterior superior temporal gyrus detects the start of sentences and phrases in natural sound mixtures, using intracranial recordings in children undergoing epilepsy surgery evaluation.
- Track how speech-onset responses in auditory cortex change from early childhood to adolescence, and how attention and self-generated speech modulate them.
More about the research
One tests therapy for adults who are losing language to dementia. The other records directly from the brains of children and teenagers to learn how the brain picks out speech.
Why it matters
People with primary progressive aphasia, including Latino and Spanish-speaking patients who are often underserved, and their care partners could gain a therapy that supports communication and quality of life across disease stages. Mapping how the developing brain segments speech could inform brain-based treatments for dyslexia, delayed language learning, developmental language disorders, auditory processing disorder, autism and aphasia. It could also aid the design of speech brain-computer interfaces.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Adeen Flinker
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Map the integration periods, the time windows over which neurons combine sound, across primary and non-primary auditory cortex, using direct cortical recordings in neurosurgical patients.
Sergey Stavisky
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Record hundreds of individual neurons with implanted microelectrode arrays in the ventral precentral gyrus and superior temporal gyrus to learn which features of speech these neurons encode and when during speaking.
James Reilly
Temple University, PA·Psychology
Detect emerging semantic deficits, loss of word and concept knowledge, in naturalistic narrative language samples from a cohort of older African American adults at elevated risk for dementia.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.