Principle Investigators
Dr. Ho Ming Chow, PhD
Dr. Chow received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. After working as an engineer for few years, he became interested in studying human cognition and went to Germany for his doctoral study. He obtained his PhD. in Cognitive Sciences with an emphasis on Cognitive Psychology at the University of Osnabrück. He completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health. Before joining the University of Delaware in 2019, he was a research faculty at the University of Michigan and Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware.
Dr. Evan Usler, PhD
Dr. Usler is an Assistant Professor in Communication Sciences & Disorders in the College of Health Sciences at the University of Delaware and the director of the Interpersonal Neurophysiology Lab. He received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Purdue University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University and MGH Institute of Health Professions.
Staff
Samuel Farrand, MS, CCC-SLP
Research Coordinator
Samuel Farrand is a speech language pathologist in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the College of Health Sciences at University of Delaware. He received his Master’s in Sciences in Speech Language Pathology from Salus University.
Nicole Guarino, PhD
Research Scientist
Dr. Guarino received her BA in Neuroscience from Franklin & Marshall University where her research was principally focused on the effects of stress on anxiety and substance use. She then attended a post-baccalaureate program at the University of Pennsylvania studying the cognitive effects of infant head injuries. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Thomas Jefferson University with a focus on the mechanisms of mitochondrial dysfunction in familial ALS. She is currently studying the biological mechanism of stutter.
Pancy C.Y. Pang, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Pang holds a BBA in Business Administration from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a BA in Psychology from Ohio University. She pursued an MSc in Psychological Research at Bangor University, UK, focusing on influence of expertise on visual art processing. Her academic journey culminated in a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Leipzig, Germany, where she explored spatial attention in somatosensory processing. Currently, her research focuses on utilizing neuroimaging and noninvasive neuromodulation techniques to study stuttering.
Students & Collaborators
Janina Boecher Caro, PhD
Research Associate
Janina earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Delaware in 2024. She is interested in oscillatory processes in the brain that govern speech perception and may underlie atypical entrainment to rhythmic sequences in people who stutter. Janina hopes to automatize computation of acoustic rhythm measures, such that they can be used as practical assessment tools in clinical contexts.
Grace Gervino
PhD Student
Grace received her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2021 and her Master of Science in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Villanova University in 2023. She is interested in using neurophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to study sensory predictions and feedback monitoring during motor planning in adults and children who stutter.
Vishruta Yawatkar
PhD Student
Vishruta Yawatkar is a PhD student at the University of Delaware, where she studies bioinformatics and data science in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
Joseph Koski
Graduate Student
Joseph Koski is a first year graduate student at the University of Delaware, studying Cognitive science within the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science. He recently graduated from UD with a Bachelors in neuroscience and hopes to obtain a Phd in neuroscience or a related field. His research interests include neurological diseases as well as neuroimaging techniques.
Bryan Lamot
PhD Student
Bryan received his Bachelor of Science degree in biomolecular sciences from Central Connecticut State University in 2022. There he had been working towards streamlining a high-throughput screening protocol aimed to identify soil-derived bacteria for signs of antibiotic production effective against the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Animal and Food Science with an interest in the contribution of aberrant lysosomal enzyme trafficking to the development of the stuttering fluency disorder.
Sayan Nanda
PhD Candidate
Sayan received his Master of Science in Data Informatics from the University of Southern California in 2019 and his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in 2017. Sayan is primarily interested in stuttering research and the application of machine learning techniques. His focus is on neuroimaging and whole-exome sequencing data.