Our Research

Movement control is one of the most complicated tasks our nervous system has to manage. The human body has over 600 muscles, whose activity must be coordinated to control the movement of over 200 bones. Daily tasks like folding laundry, standing up from a chair, walking to the kitchen, and pouring a glass of water can seem effortless. In reality, they require the nervous system to perform many computations. Movement impairments that may result from nervous system damage can cause substantial disability and impact quality of life.

Research in this focus area aims to understand how the nervous system controls, learns, and re-learns movements and how damage and recovery of specific nervous system structures impact these processes. This knowledge is critical to designing evidence-based rehabilitation protocols for people with movement impairments, including stroke, Parkinson’s disease, cerebellar damage, and spinal cord injury.

Our research spans basic science investigating the processes involved in motor control and motor recovery through the development and evaluation of interventions to enhance motor recovery and treat movement impairments in clinical trials. 

How we think, feel, and act is what makes us who we are. Cognition, behavior and emotion arise from an intricate interplay of multiple brain regions working together. This focus area encompasses our interests in numerous domains of higher-order human functioning, including attention, cognitive control, memory, spatial processing, emotional processing, and skilled action.

Our work examines the brain regions and systems that are critical for cognition, behavior and emotion, as well as how function is influenced by neurological conditions like stroke, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and Parkinson’s disease. We also develop and evaluate theory-driven assessments and treatments that target performance in these areas.

One area of particular focus is the executive system, a pivotal regulator across many domains, including decision-making, problem-solving, emotional regulation, motivation, reward processing, and goal-directed behavior. Dysregulation in the executive system often impacts people with neurological conditions, manifesting as cognitive deficits, difficulties with behavioral regulation, and emotional challenges.

Our work examines how the executive system controls language, motor, and other cognitive functions, and how social and contextual factors interact with cognition, behavior, and emotion, contributing to functional behaviors. 

Human communication is a multifaceted process that draws on language, cognitive, and sensory-motor skills and is fundamental to most aspects of human activity. This focus area brings together researchers who study the mechanisms, neuroanatomy, and functional aspects of language and communication.

Areas of interest include language production, language comprehension, multimodal communication (verbal, facial expressions, gestures, etc.), and functional communication, which takes into account social and environmental contexts and the goals of all conversational partners. 

Stroke, brain injury, and other neurological disorders often affect language and communication abilities by causing aphasia—a disorder of language—or limb apraxia, a deficit in action planning that affects the ability to produce and understand gestures.

Our research seeks to advance theoretical models of language and communication processing in people with and without aphasia and apraxia. A main theme involves translating from basic research on language processing and communication to inform therapeutic approaches for addressing aphasia and apraxia. Research designs span the translational pipeline, from basic pre-clinical studies to establishing the efficacy of different treatment approaches to treatment implementation in the clinic.