Lab Director
Ben Parrell
Position title: Assistant Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
Email: bparrell@wisc.edu
Lab Manager
Postdoctoral Research Associates
Dinglan Tang
Email: dtang38@wisc.edu
I am a postdoctoral fellow at Speech Motor Neuroscience Group at UW–Madison, a collaboration between the Brain, Language, and Acoustic Behavior Lab (PI: Niziolek) and the Speech Motor Action + Control Lab (PI: Parrell). My research focuses on the mechanisms underlying sensorimotor learning in speech at both behavioral and neural level.
I completed my PhD in Speech&Brain lab at University of Oxford in the global pandemic (2020) with Kate Watkins and co-mentor Charlotte Stagg. My PhD work focused on the auditory-motor interactions during both speech perception and production. I use a mixture of behavioural testing (e.g. real-time feedback perturbation), Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and Magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (M/EEG).
Research Staff
Chris Naber
Email: cwnaber@wisc.edu
I earned a B.A. in Psychology-Linguistics and Music Performance from Emory University in 2015. After completing UW-Madison’s CSD capstone program in Summer 2019, I began working in SMAC lab. I now program experiments related to timing in speech, assist students on their projects, and improve lab tools, such as Audapter. I hope to attend graduate school to study speech in context.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Amanda Goldstein
Email: aigoldstein@wisc.edu
I am a junior from New Jersey, so excited to be assisting in research! I am interested in the mechanisms behind speech, specifically understanding the brains function throughout speech production. I hope to become a speech language pathologist one day, aiding in fluency and articulation.
Jenna Krakauer
Email: jkrakauer@wisc.edu
I am a junior majoring in Communication Sciences & Disorders and Music Performance, and am planning to go to graduate school to become a speech-language pathologist. Motor movement in speech and it’s applications to people with neurodegenerative disorders is of particular interest to me. The more we know about the speech-motor system, the more we can learn about these disorders.
MacKenzie Maccaux
Email: mrmaccaux@wisc.edu
I am an undergraduate junior majoring in Communication Sciences and Disorders, and am planning to go to graduate school for Speech-Language Pathology and/or research. I have great interest in the relationship between cognitive function and speech production, and how brain damage can immensely alter how we speak.
Tahseen Shaik
Email: tshaik@wisc.edu
I am a sophomore at UW Madison majoring in Neurobiology, and I hope to pursue a career in medicine. I am especially interested in cognitive psychology and understanding the neuroscience of speech production.
Emily Tesch
Email: eltesch@wisc.edu
I am an undergraduate sophomore here at UW Madison majoring in Neurobiology and Spanish. I am particularly interested in the neuroscience behind speech production from a multilingual linguistics perspective.
Collaborators:
- Carrie Niziolek, UW-Madison, Communication Sciences & Disorders
- Rich Ivry, UC Berkeley, Psychology
- John Houde, Srikantan Nagarajan, & Zarniah Agnew, UC San Francisco, Speech Neuroscience Laboratory
- Vikram Ramanarayanan, Educational Testing Services
- Adam Lammert, Tom Quatieri, & Greg Ciccarelli, MIT Lincoln Labs
- Jelena Krivokapic, University of Michigan, Linguistics
- Doug Shiller, University of Montreal, Speech Language Pathology & Audiology
- Vince Gracco & Mark Tiede, Haskins Labs
- Cynthia Lee, Samantha Gordon Danner, Louis Goldstein, Sungbok Lee, Dani Byrd, & Tanner Sorensen, University of Southern California, Linguistics/SPAN group
