Kyrana Tsapkini PhD

Dr Kyrana Tsapkini is an instructor at the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She has studied in Greece, US and Canada. She holds a PhD in Neuropsychology from the University of Montreal. After completing a postdoctoral training in functional neuroimaging of language she served as faculty at the Department of Psychology at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, for 5 years. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Cognitive Science before joining the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins.
,br/> Her research interests lie in the area of language impairments in morphological processing and written language (reading and spelling) as well as brain reorganization for language. She has studied individuals with brain damage from a range of etiologies—tumor, stroke, and, recently, primary progressive aphasia (PPA) using behavioral and functional neuroimaging techniques. She is currently studying brain reorganization induced by language intervention using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

His publications are as follows:
Tsapkini K., Hillis AE. (in press). Spelling therapy in stroke and primary progressive aphasia: Differences and similarities. Behavioural neurology.
Epstein-Peterson Z., Faria A., Mori S., Hillis A., Tsapkini K. (2012). Relatively normal repetition performance despite severe disruption of the left arcuate fasciculus. Neurocase. (Epub 2012 Jan 9). doi:
10.1080/13554794.2011.633531.
Tsapkini, K., Frangakis, C, and Hillis, AE (2011). The function of the left anterior temporal lobe: evidence from acute stroke and infarct volume. Brain, 134(Pt 10): 3094-105. (Epub 2011 June 17).
Tsapkini, K., Vindiola, M, and Rapp, B. (2011). Patterns of brain reorganization subsequent to left fusiform damage: fMRI evidence form visual processing of words and pseudowords, faces and objects. Neuroimage, 55:1357-72. (Epub 2010 Dec 17).
Sepelyak, K., Crinion, J., Molitoris, J., Epstein-Peterson, Z., Bann, M., Davis, C., Newhart, M., Heidler-Gary, J., Tsapkini, K., & Hillis, A. (2011) Patterns of breakdown in spelling in Primary Progressive Aphasia. Cortex, 47 (3) 342-352.
Tsapkini, K., Vlachou, C.H., & Potagas, C. (2010). Adaptation and validation of standardized aphasia tests in different languages: Lessons from the BDAE-Short Form in Greek. Behavioral Neurology, 22(3-4), 111-119.
Tsapkini, K., & Rapp, B. (2009). “Orthographic-specific functions of the left fusiform gyrus: Evidence for modality-and category-specificity”. Cortex, 46(2): 185-205.