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Hello! My name is Kara Rosania, and I am a Bryn Mawr Psychology major. I have been a research assistant in Rob Wozniak's lab for a little more than two years now, working on research related to gesture production and comprehension. I became really interested in neural and behavioral sciences late in my sophomore year, and have been fortunate enough to integrate this interest with my background in gesture research for my thesis work. I will be assessing gesture ability in adults recovering from strokes that caused Broca's aphasia, which impairs speech production. I am hoping that what I find will indicate whether gesture is effective as a substitution for speech in communication, as well as the interaction between gesture use and the recovery of speech ability.

I also spent last summer as a research assistant at Albert Einstein College of Medicine where I worked in an auditory neuroscience lab. There we studied how the brain integrates and segregates streams of sound using analysis of auditory evoked potentials. This kind of research has a lot of important applications, including a possible explanation of what causes language delays and speech impediments in some children. Other research that I worked on in this lab provided important information about the plasticity of the auditory cortex in hearing-impaired individuals to better understand the effectiveness of cortical implants at various stages of development. I really enjoy research and hope to go to graduate school next year to study neuroscience. Specifically I want to integrate the areas that I've studied so far and learn more about the relationship between auditory perception and speech development. I'm also interested in a lot of tangential topics related to these feilds, but I figure this is a good place to start. Obviously I think studying neuroscience is important, since I hope to do it for many years to come, if only because of the possibilities for increasing the quality of life for so many individuals. However, I hope to discuss at greater length the ethical issues involved in applying what is learned in this field. 

I hope that in this class I can learn more about the research that is being done in other areas, and how they relate to the work that I've done and am hoping to do in the future. I find it exciting that we all come from such different backgrounds and vary so greatly in our experimental approaches and research topics, and I think this will lead to some really great discussions. See you all on Tuesday!