about me...
My very first integration to the linguist field took place during my undergraduate studies (2003-2007) at the Department of Mediterranean Studies/ Division of Linguistics, University of the Aegean in Rhodes, Greece. I admit that from day one I had started searching for what interests me the most. After a while, it was clear to me that neurolinguistics and specifically, aphasia was a beloved area to me. In fact, I could attend classes with real astonishment! Thus, I spent a year (2006-2007) at the University of Konstanz, Germany as an Erasmus exchange student trying to discover as much as I could for the field. Subsequently, I attended the European Masters program of Clinical Linguistics (2007-2008) at the Universities of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Potsdam (Germany). During these years, I was lucky to get to know some brilliant minds, to whom I am grateful!
I then completed my Ph.D. in Neurolinguistics at University of Athens (2009-2013) working under the supervision of Dr. Spyridoula Varlokosta (University of Athens), Dr. Despoina Papadopoulou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and Dr. Roelien Bastiaanse (University of Groningen, The Netherlands). The main focus of my research was on the assessment of sentence level disorders, both for production and comprehension, in Greek aphasia. This project was partially funded by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: THALIS - Levels of impairment in Greek aphasia: Relationship with processing deficits, brain region, and therapeutic implications, University of Athens, Principal Investigator: Dr. Spyridoula Varlokosta.
-In 2013 I joined Dr. Cynthia Thompson's laboratory at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral fellow. There, I had the chance to work on many different projects related to language processing in cognitively healthy volunteers and individuals with stroke-induced and Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). Some of the research activities that I participated are listed below:
· Assessment of recovery patterns in sentence production (by using eye-tracking and fMRI).
· Evaluation of the effectiveness of rTMS as an intervention tool for naming deficits in PPA.
· Assessment of derivational morphology in individuals with PPA (E-prime, EEG).
· Assessment of complementizer and adjective production in agrammatic individuals (E-prime).
· Standardization of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences in Greek
· Assessing the effectiveness of TUF treatment (Treatment of underlying forms) in Greek individuals with agrammatic aphasia.
-Since 2017, I am working as a postdoctoral fellow in the project " Infrastructure and integrated tools for personalized learning of reading skills (iREAD)" led by University College London, Department of Education. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 731724. The aim of project is to develop serious literacy games for personalized learning, to enhance reading skills for novice readers and children with dyslexia.
-I am additionally working as an external collaborator/research associate at the project "Investigating the effectiveness of cognitive vs. linguistic treatment in language disorders: behavioral and transcranial magnetic stimulation approaches" (2019-2021) led by the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Principal Investigator: Dr. Christina Manouilidou. This project was funded by the ARRS (Slovenian Research Funding Agency) J6-1806.
-Recently, we received a grant from the Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation for the project "Language and Executive Function Intervention Strategies in Language Disorders (LeFIELD)" (2019-2022), where I am working as a postdoctoral fellow. Principal Investigator: Dr. Spyridoula Varlokosta.
-Additionally, I am working as a postdoctoral fellow at the project "Speech and Language Therapy Platform with virtual agent, PLanV" (2020-2023), funded by the Management and Implementation Authority for Research, Technological Development and Innovation Actions (MIA-RTDI), Principal investigator: Dr. Arhonto Terzi