Emily Goldberg

As an undergraduate and master’s student in Speech-Language Pathology, Emily gravitated toward research and worked with Drs. Sheila Pratt and Malcolm McNeil to accomplish two masters-level thesis projects. During her clinical fellowship year in speech-language pathology at VA Pittsburgh, Emily discovered her passion for engaging with individuals with post-stroke aphasia. So many individuals with aphasia are left with lasting, chronic language impairments, and she became interested in treatment response variability, which may be driven by stroke-induced comorbid non-language cognitive deficits. Emily decided to begin her Ph.D. with Dr. Michael Walsh Dickey to determine what drives aphasia treatment outcome variability. She hopes that her research program will characterize diverse treatment responses in individuals with aphasia who demonstrate heterogeneous language and cognitive
profiles. Ultimately, Emily felt motivated to begin her Ph.D. so that her research could improve service delivery and, ultimately, quality of life for individuals with aphasia. Moreover, Emily feels enthusiastic about teaching, mentoring, and training future speech-language pathologists.