Kelly Michaelis - Postdoctoral Scientist

Kelly will be joining the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in the summer of 2021. Kelly completed her doctoral training in the Cognitive Recovery Lab at Georgetown University Medical Center under the mentorship of Dr. Peter Turkeltaub. Broadly, Kelly’s research has focused on how neural networks interact to process dynamic stimuli like speech and rhythm, both in the healthy brain and after neurological injury. With funding support from an NSF Graduate Fellowship award, Kelly’s work used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural mechanisms underlying auditory and audiovisual speech perception, while carefully controlling for cognitive factors like attention and decision-making. While in the Cognitive Recovery Lab, Kelly also completed a project that used machine learning to investigate how factors like aging and temporal perception ability influence speech perception in stroke survivors with language deficits. In her current role as a postdoctoral research fellow at National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, she is using behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to investigate how rapidly learned information is consolidated into memory, both in the speech and motor domains. Kelly has a strong interest in pursuing research questions that have direct applications outside of the lab, and in the Lab for Relational Cognition she will be leading an NSF-funded project investigating the behavioral and neural impacts of a spatial reasoning intervention in high school STEM classrooms. In addition, she will be drawing on her previous experience designing behavioral paradigms and using research methods like EEG and non-invasive brain stimulation to develop a new line of research focused on understanding and modulating neural networks. In her spare time, Kelly loves hiking, cycling, and running, and she can’t wait to get back to attending concerts as soon as the pandemic is over.