Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences PhD Student Hilary Miller Awarded NIH Grant

Hilary Miller, a PhD candidate in Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences at Sargent College and graduate fellow at BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, was awarded a Predoctoral Individual National Research Service grant from theĀ National Institutes of Health for herĀ project “Predictors of Speech Motor Sequence Learning in Neurological Disorders.” Miller will use this funding to study how patients with primary progressive aphasia learn new speech sequences in order to determine the brain regions that support successful learning, and if patients’ patterns of brain atrophy are predictive of their learning success.

Miller studies neural control of speech in the Speech Neuroscience Lab with Professor Frank Guenther, and her research focuses on applying neurocomputational models and neuroimaging methods to understand the neural bases of motor speech disorders.

Previously, she was the recipient of a prestigious ASHFoundation New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship, which recognizes strong doctoral candidates who demonstrate academic excellence and a commitment to a teacher-investigator career in the field of communication sciences and disorders.

Miller received a dual degree from the University of New Hampshire with a BS in chemistry and BA in Spanish. She earned her MS in communication sciences and disorders at the University of New Hampshire, where she completed a thesis on treatment of childhood apraxia of speech. Prior to beginning her PhD at Boston University, she worked as a speech-language pathologist in the Vermont public school system.