Neuroscientist
If we are to reduce the burden of dementia, we must embrace a pluralistic philosophy for research, clinical, and awareness-raising activities.
Adolfo is a cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in language and interpersonal communication.
Allan Holdsworth
The only truly unachievable goal is the one you do not pursue
Dementia is a multidetermined phenomenon. Therefore, no single approach will hold the key to its full understanding and management. If we are to reduce the burden of dementia, we must embrace a pluralistic philosophy for research, clinical, and awareness-raising activities.
Adolfo’s research combines neurolinguistic experiments, formal language assessments, and natural speech analysis to characterize and discriminate among different neurodegenerative diseases. Verbal skills are variously vulnerable to neurodegeneration and understanding their disturbances can inform diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring procedures.
Adolfo’s goal as an Atlantic Fellow is to optimize current language-oriented assessments of neurodegeneration. By identifying automated, affordable, and scalable linguistic markers of neurodegenerative diseases, he aims to promote more equitable clinical opportunities for patients in Latin America and beyond.
Neurodegeneration and dementia are escalating across Latin America. Yet, gold-standard diagnostic techniques are often unavailable or unaffordable for most patients. Cutting-edge neurolinguistic assessments can offer sensitive, affordable, non-invasive, and ecological alternatives to discriminate among neurodegenerative diseases and track symptom severity.
Adolfo García, PhD, specializes in the neuroscience of language. He serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina), Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute (University of California, San Francisco), and Associate Researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He is also co-founder of Include, a global network for crosslinguistic research on brain health; and creator of TELL, a speech testing app. He has obtained funds from multiple international agencies, including a USD 8.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health on linguistic markers of dementia. He has authored more than 200 publications and offered 250 presentations. His science communication milestones include a TEDx talk with a live audience of 12,000 persons, the TV show “Of brains and words,” the video series “Language, brain, and body,” the radio column “Mind and communication,” and the documentary “Impulso sonoro” (Canal Encuentro). His contributions have been recognized by the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, the Argentine Association of Behavioral Science, the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires, the Alzheimer’s Association, and Harvard’s Ig Nobel awards. He also received the Early Career Award, from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language; and the UpLink Top Innovator Award, from the World Economic Forum.
Adolfo M.
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