Kerry Dathan

I joined the UCL Cognition and Grammar Lab in September 2022 when I started my Stroke Association funded PhD, supervised by Professor Rosemary Varley and Dr. Suzanne Beeke. My PhD project focuses on evaluating UTILISE, a sentence-level therapy app for people with aphasia, or language impairment, after stroke. I hope to discover the relationship between self-delivered therapy app “dose” and production and comprehension outcomes, learn the views of people with aphasia about the app, and evaluate the impact of ordering UTILISE before or after a lexical therapy. 

My motivation for this project is rooted in my four years working in the NHS as a speech and language therapist with people with neurological conditions such as stroke, brain injury, MND, dementia and many more. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to really know and support people from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds as I worked in a neurorehabilitation hospital, outpatient clinics, and in people’s homes. I saw stroke services change dramatically because of the covid pandemic, creating an urgent need for research on remote, sentence-level therapies for people with aphasia.

I trained as a speech and language therapist during my MSc Speech and Language Sciences at UCL (distinction), during which I completed a research project using frequency-based analysis of the language of people with Parkinson’s Disease, supervised by Professor Rosemary Varley and Dr Vitor Zimmerer. This built on skills developed in my undergraduate degree in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge (first class).

• Email: kerry.dathan@ucl.ac.uk

• Phone: 020 3108 5381

• Twitter: @KerryDathan