Ria De Bleser, Ph.D.
University of Potsdam

Alexandra Economou. Ph.D.
National University of Athens

Bryan Fantie, Ph.D.
American University

Jack Fletcher, Ph.D.
University of Texas-Houston Medical School

David Francis, Ph.D.
University of Houston

Eva Kehayia, Ph.D.
McGill University

Andrew Kertesz, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Western Ontario

Richard Meier, Ph.D.
University of Texas at Austin

Michel Paradis, Ph.D.
McGill University

Athanassios Protopapas, Ph.D.
Panteion University

Angela Ralli, Ph.D.
University of Patras

Alexandra Isabel Dias Reis, Ph.D.
University of Algarve

Carlo Semenza, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Trieste

Elzbieta Szelag, Ph.D.
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology

Kyrana Tsapkini, Ph.D.
Université de Montréal

Harry Whitaker, Ph.D.
Northern Michigan University

ALEXANDRA ECONOMOU, has a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (City University of New York, Graduate Center). She teaches undergraduate neuropsychology and experimental psychology courses at the University of Athens, Department of Psychology, as well as at two graduate programs of the same University, the Clinical Psychology program and the School Psychology program. Her teaching responsibilities include a neuropsychology course at the Psychology Department of Panteion University and a course on learning and plasticity at the inter-departmental graduate program in Cognitive Science at the University of Athens. She is a research associate at the department of Neurology of Athens General Hospital “G. Gennimatas”, where she is responsible for the setting up neuropsychological assessment protocols for the early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease, and for patient evaluations. Her research in language focuses on: 1) acquired language disorders, with an emphasis on acquired reading disorders, 2) phonological and acoustical features of disordered speech as well as of speech segments from different languages, and 3) the organization of language as a function of level of literacy. Dr. Economou is vice-president of the Greek Aphasia Association.  E-mail: aecon@otenet.gr.
 

JACK M. FLETCHER, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas-HoustonHeath Science Center, and Associate Director, Center for Academic and Reading Skills.   For the past 20 years, Dr. Fletcher, a  board- certified child neuropsychologist, has completed research on many aspects of the development of reading, language, and other cognitive skills in children.  He has worked extensively on issues related to learning and attention problems, including definition and classification, neurobiological correlates, and most recently, intervention, with specific attention to policy as outlined in IDEA.   He collaborates on several grants on reading and attention, and is Principle Investigator of a multi-disciplinary grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation under the Interagency Educational Research Initiative. Dr. Fletcher is also Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on NIH-funded research projects involving children with brain injuries, including PI on a program project on spina bifida. Dr. Fletcher is part of a large consortium of investigators from the University of Houston, University of Texas-Houston, University of Texas-Austin, and California State University-Long Beach who recently received a program project grant involving the development of literacy skills in Spanish-speaking and bilingual children under the recent NICHD/Department of Education Bilingual Research Initiative. Dr. Fletcher served on and chaired the NICHD Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities study section and is a former member of the NICHD Maternal and Child Health study section.  He was a member of the National Consensus Panel on Phenylketonuria sponsored by OMAR at NIH and presently serves on the OERI commissioned Rand Reading Study Group and the National Research Council Committee on Scientific Principles in Education Research. Dr. Fletcher chaired a committee on children with persistent reading disability for the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and served on a task force on reading for HISD that produced a report widely cited within the state of Texas as a model for enhancing reading instruction in elementary school children. He has received several service awards from local school districts and regularly consults with districts and the Texas Educational Agency on issues related to special education.  Dr. Fletcher founded and directed the School Problems Clinic at the University of Texas- Houston for many years, which provided evaluations of children with disabilities and related educational needs. E-mail:Jack.Fletcher@uth.tmc.edu
 

DAVID J. FRANCIS, is a professor of Quantitative Methods in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, and Director of the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics at the University of Houston.  Dr. Francis obtained a doctoral degree in Clinical-Neuropsychology form the University of Houston in 1985 with a specialization in Quantitative Methods.  He is a Fellow of Division 5 (Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics) of the American Psychology Association and currently chairs the Mental Retardation Research Subcommittee of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).  He was recently appointed to the Advisory Council on Education Statistics, a national advisory board to the U.S. Secretary of Education.  He is also the recipient of the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award and a former member of the National Institute of Health's Behavioral Medicine Section.  Dr. Francis has collaborated in research on reading and reading disabilities, attention problems, developmental consequences of brain injuries and birth defects, and adolescent alcohol abuse.  His areas of quantitative interest include modeling of individual growth, multi-level and mixture modeling, structural equation modeling, item response theory, and exploratory data analysis.  He currently collaborates on multiple contracts and grants funded by NICHD, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, the National Institute of Neurological disorders and Stroke, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health's Office on AIDS, the Texas Educational Agency, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and directs two large programmatic grants on language and literacy development in Spanish-Speaking children for NICHD and OERI.  Dr. Francis currently serves as a consulting editor to the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, and the Archives of General Psychiatry.  He has Previously served as a consulting editor for Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.  Dr. Francis is also a founding partner of FSD Data Services, Inc., a contract research services firm based out of Houston, TX.  E-mail: dfrancis@uh.edu
 

EVA KEHAYIA.  Dr. Eva Kehayia has a Ph.D. in Linguistics/Neurolinguistics and postdoctoral training in Psycholinguistics.  She is an Associate Professor in the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the same university.  She is director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal, Canada, responsible for psychosocial research.  She heads the McGill University branch of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research project investigating the 'Architecture and Nature of the Mental Lexicon'.  She also heads the Language and Communication Research Lab at the Jewish Rehabilitation Hospital in Laval, Canada. Her research focuses on three areas: 1) the study of the representation, organization and access of language across different languages, 2) the study of language breakdown in acquired and developmental language disorders (aphasia following stroke, language deficits following traumatic brain injury and specific language impairment) and 3) the impact of language disorders on the individual's everyday life.  E-mail: ekehay@po-box.mcgill.ca
 

ANDREW KERTESZ, M.D.  Dr. Andrew Kertesz is Professor of Neurology in the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.  He is Director of Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Research Centre at St. Joseph's Health Care London – St. Joseph’s Hospital, and former Chief of the Department of Neurology.  He graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, studied neurology in Toronto, and behavioural neurology in Boston.  His publications deal with the classification, localization and recovery in aphasia, as well as alexia, apraxia, visual agnosia and dementia.  His books include "Aphasia and Associated Disorders" by Grune and Stratton (1979), "Localization in Neuropsychology" published by Academic Press (1983), "Localization and Neuroimaging in Neuropsychology" by Academic Press (1994),  the "Western Aphasia Battery", published by Grune & Stratton and the Psychological Corporation (1982).  His most recent book, co-authored by Dr. David Munoz, is entitled, “Pick’s Disease and Pick Complex” by Wiley-Liss Inc. (1998). Recent research projects are the experimental treatment of acute stroke, Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, primary progressive aphasia, and Pick’s disease.  He and his team recently standardized a Frontal Behavioral Inventory for the diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia.
E-mail: andrew.kertesz@sjhc.london.on.ca
 

RICHARD P. MEIER.  Dr. Meier received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego in 1982.  His dissertation examined the acquisition of verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children of deaf parents.  Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Stanford University before joining the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1986.  Currently he is Professor of Linguistics and Psychology. Dr. Meier's research and teaching focus on two areas: on first language acquisition and on the linguistics and acquisition of signed languages.  His current research probes early sign development in children, with attention particularly to the factors that may determine the form of children's early signs. A very recent paper (Cheek, Cormier, Repp, & Meier 2001 in the journal, Language) compared the form of prelinguistic gestures in deaf and hearing children with the form of early signs in deaf children of deaf, signing parents. He has long-standing interests in the linguistics of the pronominal systems of signed languages, and in their verb agreement systems.  In recent years, his group has investigated a number of different signed languages, not only ASL, but also Mexican, Spanish, and German Sign Languages.  His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and by the National Science Foundation.  Along with two of his doctoral students, Dr. Meier is the editor of an upcoming book from Cambridge University Press (Meier, Cormier, & Quinto, eds.  Forthcoming. Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages .).  This collection of papers explores the possible effects that  transmission modality (i.e., the visual gestural modality of signed languages or the oral-aural modality of spoken languages) may have on the structure of signed and spoken languages. Click here to view Dr. Meier's CV.  E-mail: rmeier@mail.utexas.edu
 

MICHEL PARADIS, Ph.D. (Philosophy, McGill), Ph.D. (Neurolinguistics, Université de Montréal),  is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; Emeritus Professor of Neurolinguistics, Department of Linguistics, McGill University; Adjunct Professor, Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Université du Québec à Montréal.  Author of over 70 articles and chapters, 11 books, among which The Assessment of Bilingual Aphasia (1987) and of The Bilingual Aphasia Test, now available in over 65 languages and 170 specific language-pair combinations; Foundations of Aphasia Rehabilitation (1993), Aspects of Bilingual Aphasia (1995), Pragmatics in Neurogenic Communication Disorders (1998), and Manifestations of aphasia symptoms in different languages (2001). Chair of the Aphasia Committee of the International Association of Logopaedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) from 1989 to 2001. American Editor of the Journal of Neurolinguistics; on the Editorial Board of Brain and Language, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, International Journal of Bilingualism, and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. His works on the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism have been cited over 1,000 times in 190 different journals covering disciplines as diverse as language acquisition and learning, language pathology, linguistics, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology.
E-mail: mparad@po-box.mcgill.ca
 

ATHANASSIOS PROTOPAPAS, Ph.D., is a Researcher (level B) and a member of the Scientific Board at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) in Athens, Greece. Born and raised in Athens, he obtained a degree in Physics (1991) from the University of Patras, Greece, and MSc in Engineering (1995) and MSc (1993) and PhD(1997) in Cognitive Science from Brown University, U.S.A.  His main interests and research experience have revolved around the perception and processing of spoken language, including brain processes and cognitive and connectionist modeling, as well as acoustics, phonetics, and digital signal processing algorithms. He has studied perceptual aspects of speech at the prosodic, phonetic, syllabic and lexical level.  From 1996 through 1998 he worked as a researcher for a neuroscience-based U.S. company that makes multimedia remediation software for language-learning impaired children. There he studied nonverbal auditory perception as it relates to language and reading skills, supported by neuroimaging, and also worked on developing automated diagnostic tools and phonetic training for foreign language learning. He is the author or co-author of several peer-reviewed journal articles an inventor or co-inventor of six U.S. patents in these areas.  Since his return to Greece in 1999 he has been at ILSP, focusing his efforts in the area of computer-based diagnostic and remedial tools for developmental and acquired disorders related to language. He directs a project developing automated computer-based screening tools for reading-impaired students. He is the coordinator of a European multinational project related to multimedia indexing, another on supplementing speech therapy using computer-based speech visualization, and he also participates in other projects related to speech processing.  He is the Greek representative on the "working group on health and persons with special needs" of the Information Society Technologies Committee of the European Commission, and on COST actions related to speech processing. He teaches three undergraduate neuroscience courses at the Department of Psychology of the Panteion University of Athens and a course on learning and plasticity at the inter-departmental graduate program in cognitive science of the University of Athens.  He has also taught introductory cognitive psychology at the Aegean University, and lectured on dyslexia and on cognitive mechanisms of problem solving in seminars for educators.
E-mail: protopap@ilsp.gr
 

ANGELA RALLI, Ph.D., is a professor of General Linguistics at the Department of Philology (Linguistics Division) of the University of Patras (Greece). From 1990 to 1993, she has been Assistant Professor at the Department of French Studies at the University of Athens, and from 1993 to 1997 Associate Professor at the same Department. She has also held a senior research position at the Institute of Natural Language Processing in Athens (1988-1991) and short-term visiting appointments at the University of Amsterdam (1995-96), and the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in 1996-97. In 1999, she won the Faculty Enrichment Award, granted by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for academic achievement. She completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. studies at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Montreal, with a specialization in Generative Morphology, both synchronic and historical (1988). While a graduate student, she won the SSHRC Canadian award for academic excellence.  She is fluent in 4 languages, Greek (native competence), English, Italian, and French, while she has a sufficient working knowledge of German, Spanish and Russian. Her main research interests focus on morphology and its relationship to syntax and phonology. These include topics such as inflection, compounding, and the domain of morphology in grammar. She has been the principal investigator of a large consortium of researchers working on European compounds, and has directed projects related to issues of dialectology and minority languages, and the development of morphological processors and electronic dictionaries. She also collaborates on several grants on theoretical linguistics, morphology and the mental lexicon (Canadian Research Council), and speech disabilities in early childhood (Cyprus Research Institute of Genetics). Dr. Ralli is on the editorial board of the Journal of Greek Linguistics (John Benjamins) and co-editor of a number of volumes, including the Comparative Syntax of Balkan Languages (2001, Oxford University Press). She has published articles in international journals, such as Language and Speech, The Linguistic Review, Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, Yearbook of Morphology, Acta Linguistica Hungarica, and has been a reviewer for several publishing houses.  In addition to research and teaching, Dr. Ralli has maintained an active level of professional activities. She has been an elected member of the GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) Board (1994-1999), and is a permanent member of the scientific committee of the Mediterranean Conference of Morphology. She has also organized the 18th GLOW Colloquium (Athens, 1996), the First Mediterranean Meeting of Morphology (Mytilene, 1997), the Thermi International Summer School in Linguistics (TISSL, 1999), and the First International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory (Patras, 2000).  E-mail: aralli@cc.uoa.gr
 

ALEXANDRA ISABEL DIAS REIS, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology, Biological and Behavioural Physiology at the University of Algarve, Portugal, since October 2000. She initiated her professional activity in 1992 at the Laboratory for Language Studies, Hospital de Santa Maria in Lisbon, Portugal, assessing brain-damaged patients, while conducting research on the modulatory influence of formal schooling and literacy on human cognition. During this period she collaborated in European projects related to the evaluation and rehabilitation of brain damaged patients as well as functional neuroimaging of language and the recovery from aphasia. In 1997 she concluded her PhD thesis on the neuropsychology of illiteracy. In 1995, she started collaborating with the Cognitive Neurophisiology Research Group at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, where she undertook a post-doctoral scholarship from October 98 until October 99. Ever since, her main line of investigation has been focused on cognitive neuroscience and the implications of literacy / illiteracy on the human brain.  Click here to view Dr. Reis' CV.   E-mail: aireis@ualg.pt
 
 

RIA DE BLESER,Ph.D.
University of Potsdam
Click hereto view Dr. De Bleser's profile.
Click here to view Dr. De Bleser's homepage.
E-mail: debleser@ling.uni-potsdam.de
 

BRYAN FANTIE, Ph.D.
American University
Click here to view Dr. Fantie's homepage.
E-mail: bfantie@american.edu
 

CARLO SEMENZA, M.D., Ph.D.
University of Trieste
Click here to view Dr. Semenza's CV.
E-mail: smenza@univ.trieste.it
 

ELZBIETA SZELAG, Ph.D.
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology
Click here to view Dr. Szelag's CV.
E-mail: szelag@nencki.gov.pl

KYRANA TSAPKINI, Ph.D.
Université de Montréal
E-mail: kyrana.tsapkini@umontreal.ca
 

HARRY WHITAKER, Ph.D.
Northern Michigan University
Click here to view Dr. Whitaker's CV.
E-mail: hwhitake@nmu.edu
 
 

| Home |