Author
Cynthia K. Thompson, PhD
Dr. Thompson is a Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Neurology at Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois, with faculty appointments in the School of Communication, Feinberg School of Medicine, the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimers Disease Center, and the Neuroscience Institute. She holds academic degrees in Psychology and Speech and Language Pathology from the University of Oregon and the University of Kansas, respectively. A leading researcher in the field, she uses what is known about normal language processing and representation to guide studies of language breakdown and recovery in persons with stroke-induced aphasia. These patterns provide blueprints for clinical protocols and, in turn, address the utility of this translational approach for studying language disorders. She also studies the processing mechanisms that support recovery by tracking eye movements in sentence processing and production, and the neural correlates of recovery using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD) for over 15 years and has led to publication of over 70 articles in referred journals and 28 book chapters.
Dr. Thompson is a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimers Disease Center (at Northwestern), and recipient of the Walder Award for Research Excellence at Northwestern (2007). She is a member of the Academy of Aphasia (Board of Governors of the Academy from 2003-2006), the Academy of Neurological Communication Disorders and Sciences (ANCDS), the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), the International Neuropsychological Society (INS), the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), and the Society for Neuroscience (SFN).