Lab Members

Ho Ming Chow, PhD

Principal Investigator

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 Ph.D. 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.

Samuel Farrand, MS, CCC-SLP

Speech-language Pathologist / Lab 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

Postdoctoral 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 Pang, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Dr. Pang is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the College of Health Sciences at the University of Delaware. She received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Leipzig in Germany. Her focus is on applying neuroimaging and noninvasive neuromodulation to study stuttering. 

Sayan Nanda

PhD Student

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 currently a Ph.D. student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders department. Sayan is primarily interested in stuttering research and the application of machine learning techniques in the same. His focus is on neuroimaging and whole-exome sequencing data.

Vishruta Prashant Yawatkar

PhD Student

Vishruta earned an integrated BS-MS degree from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune in 2018. While at IISER, she studied the acoustic introductory gestures in songbirds. As a part of her master’s thesis, she worked at the National University of Singapore, where she analyzed underwater bioacoustics data to study the learning of an echolocation task in dolphins. Vishruta graduated with an MS in data science from the University of Delaware in 2021. As a part of her master’s thesis for this degree, she worked on using machine learning methods to evaluate remotely sensed imagery. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Bioinformatics Data Science Program and is co-advised by Dr. Usler and Dr. Chow. She is interested in using data science techniques and image and signal processing methods to analyze various data, including fMRI and EEG data, to study fluency disorders. 

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.

Charitha Sumeet

Master’s Student

Charitha Sumeet is currently pursuing an MS in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Delaware. Her previous research experience focused on utilizing processed fish waste to investigate collagen cryptic peptides. She gained her industrial experience as a Scientific Analyst and was involved in bio-curation and data mining of research data while ensuring it’s quality from research studies based on pre-clinical trials for drug development. Currently, she is interested in exploring the gut-brain axis and its impact on speech development through MRI, neuroimaging analysis along with microbial genome analysis.

Key Collaborators

Evan Usler, PhD

Assistant Professor, University Delaware

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.

Soo-Eun Chang, PhD, CCC-SLP

Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Dr. Chang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Rosa Casco Solano-Lopez Research Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, and the director of the Speech Neurophysiology Lab at the University of Michigan. Dr. Chang received her clinical training as a Speech-Language Pathologist at Vanderbilt University, received her Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and trained as a postdoctoral research fellow at the NINDS Intramural Research Program at the NIH.