October was a busy and productive month for MRRI scientists. In addition to receiving three new grant awards from the Albert Einstein Society, our researchers presented oral and poster presentations at seven different national and international virtual conferences.

MRRI Director Dylan Edwards, PhD, presented a virtual seminar on combinatorial approaches in robotic rehabilitation at the World Congress for NeuroRehabilitation, and also served on a panel on biases in research and research funding at the American Medical Rehabilitation Providers Association Educational Virtual Conference and Expo.

Work on cognitive planning for action imitation from the laboratory of MRRI Associate Director Laurel Buxbaum, PsyD, was presented at the Neuromatch 3.0 online conference. In addition, new findings from Dr. Buxbaum’s group on audiovisual comprehension in people with aphasia was presented at the virtual meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language.

Erica Middleton, PhD, served as an author on a poster presentation at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language that shared their recent data on the neural bases of conceptual combination in people with aphasia after stroke. Dr. Middleton also presented a poster at the virtual meeting of the Academy of Aphasia on how distributed practice and criterion level affect word retrieval in people with aphasia.

John Whyte, MD, PhD, participated in a variety of events at the recent American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) virtual conference. He co-led a half-day course on the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) and presented a symposium on how to use the RTSS to improve research design and the clinical implementation of research. Dr. Whyte also spoke about improving access to sleep apnea diagnosis for people with acute traumatic brain injury to maximize the outcomes of neurorehabilitation. In addition, he served as a panelist for the Women in Rehabilitation Science Symposium.

At the ACRM conference, MRRI Institute Scientist Umesh Venkatesan, PhD, presented research from his lab that examined the associations between the duration of post-traumatic amnesia and memory impairment in people with chronic moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury. We are proud to announce that Dr. Venkatesan’s poster was chosen to receive the Brain Injury Interdisciplinary Special Interest Group Early Career Poster Award.

Amanda Rabinowitz, PhD, also spoke at ACRM as part of a symposium on best practice interventions for managing acutely confused patients during inpatient rehabilitation.

These virtual conferences provided valuable opportunities for MRRI scientists to share their work, hear more about studies conducted by researchers from around the world, generate new ideas, and reconnect with collaborators and colleagues.