Kate Watkins

MA PhD

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Principal Investigator Brain, Speech & Language Research Group
Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford

Neural basis of speech and language

Biography

I trained in neuropsychology at the Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. My doctoral research used neuropsychology and structural image analysis to study the KE family, in which affected members have a severe motor speech disorder linked to a variant in the gene FOXP2. My post-doctoral training was at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where I used TMS to study the role of the motor cortex in speech perception. I have been in Oxford since 2003. I was appointed as an Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology in 2006 and as a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2014. I co-founded and am co-Editor-in-Chief of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language's open access journal Neurobiology of Language, published by the MIT Press.

Research Summary

I am interested in how the brain communicates using speech and language and what is different about the minds and brains of people who have difficulty with speech or language.

My general research interests are in the area of cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, I am interested in the brain processes underlying speech and language and brain development. This is studied by working with populations of children and adults with developmental disorders of speech and language, e.g. stuttering/stammering, developmental language disorder (DLD). We use a number of different methods in our research including cognitivel testing, brain imaging, and brain stimulation.