Andrew DeMarco, PhD receives NIH Pathway to Independence Award K99/R00

Dr. Andrew DeMarco, Instructor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center, was awarded the NIH Pathway to Independence Award Research Career Development Award. Dr. DeMarco is a cognitive neuroscientist and ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist. His research goals involve understanding the cognitive and neural architecture of language in the brain, and how it breaks down and reorganizes in stroke aphasia. His most recent work has involved developing a machine learning technique, functional anomaly mapping, to derive brain-wide maps of dysfunction to measure direct and indirect effects of stroke lesions.

The goal of this study is to understand the neurobiological mechanisms generating the remote dysfunction observed in functional anomaly mapping images in individual patients with aphasia, to optimize the technique, and in the R00 phase to deploy the method in a study of aphasia recovery and test the central hypothesis that recovery of remote dysfunction (RRD) relates to behavioral improvement in aphasia recovery.