NIDCD Grantee Named AAAS Fellow

November 4, 2005

NIDCD is pleased to announce that one of its grantees, Sheila Blumstein, Ph.D., has been named a 2005 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Blumstein is one of 376 individuals who were honored this year for their distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. Fellows are elected each year by their peers in AAAS.

For 35 years, Blumstein has made important contributions to our understanding of the relationships between language and the brain. Her research focuses primarily on how speech is understood by both healthy people and people with aphasia, a disorder frequently caused by stroke that results from damage to the language centers of the brain. By studying the effects of brain damage on normal language processes, she has provided a window into the neurological bases of language and the mechanisms contributing to normal language processing. In the last few years, Blumstein has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to better understand the brain systems at work in this process.

Blumstein is currently the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. In addition to receiving funding from the NIDCD, she is also a former member of the National Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council. Read more about Dr. Blumstein.