Nina F. Dronkers MA, PhD

Dr. Dronkers' research and clinical interests have always focused on understanding the speech, language, and cognitive disorders that occur after injury to the brain. She and her colleagues have worked extensively with individuals who have aphasia to understand the relationship between areas of the brain affected by injury and the speech and language disorders that ensue. Using novel methodologies, Dr. Dronkers and her colleagues have isolated numerous brain regions that play critical roles in the processing of speech and language, as well as how these relate to other cognitive skills. Her latest work involves analyzing the structural and functional connections that contribute to language and cognitive processing through advanced work with diffusion and resting state functional neuroimaging.

Her publications area s follows:
Thiebaut de Schotten, M., Dell'Acqua,F., Ratiu, P., Leslie, A., Howells, H., Cabanis, E., Iba-Zizen, M.T., Plaisant, O., Simmons, A., Dronkers, N.F., Corkin, S. & Catani, M. From Phineas Gage and Monsieur Leborgne to H.M.: Revisiting Disconnection Syndromes Cerebral Cortex 2015doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv173.
Ar valo AL, Baldo JV, Dronkers NF. What do brain lesions tell us about theories of embodied semantics and the human mirror neuron system? Cortex 2012 48(2):242-54.
Baldo JV, Katseff S, Dronkers NF. Brain regions underlying repetition and auditory-verbal short-term memory deficits in aphasia: Evidence from voxel-based lesion symptom mapping Aphasiology 2012 26(3-4):338-54.
Galantucci, S., Tartaglia, M.C., Wilson, S.M., Henry, M.L., Filippi, M., Agosta, F., Dronkers, N.F., Henry, R.G., Ogar, J.M., Miller, B.L., Gorno-Tempini, M.L. White matter damage in primary progressive aphasias: a diffusion tensor tractography study Cortex 2011 48(2):242-54.
Baldo, J. V., Arevalo, A., Patterson, J. P., & Dronkers, N. F. (in press). Grey and white matter correlates of picture naming: Evidence from a voxel-based lesion analysis of the Boston Naming Test. Cortex.
Turken AU, Dronkers NF. The Neural Architecture of the Language Comprehension Network: Converging Evidence from Lesion and Connectivity Analyses Front Syst Neurosci. 2011 5: 1.