Interests
Petronilla Battista, PhD
Neuropsychologist
We need to improve the awareness and knowledge of the benefits of a coordinated response to care.
Current Work
Petronilla is a neuropsychologist with clinical and research experience in cognitive, language, and communication disorders in patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA).
Personal Hero
Roger Schutz
Words of Strength
Curiosity
Vision
Petronilla believes we need to improve the awareness and knowledge of the benefits of a coordinated response to care. Dementia care, as well as chronic disease management incorporating a multidisciplinary team, could be supported by the development of appropriate practice guidelines.
Strategy
Petronilla is focused on the impact of linguistic, social, and cultural factors on the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) to facilitate our predictions about disease susceptibility and outcome. She's also working on delivering programs for older adults with PPA conditions resulting in severe and complex presentations.
Impact
Petronilla’s role is to develop new tests for the assessment of complex linguistic and cognitive disorders. The knowledge about human linguistic/cultural aspects will also be useful for her in dealing with the implementation of tailored language treatments through advanced therapeutic technologies.
Motivation
Many older adults do not receive an early diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) or adequate care due to the great skepticism about the potential benefit offered by non-pharmacological interventions. People with PPA aren’t usually referred to speech-language or neuropsychological services.
Education & Experience
Petronilla completed her doctorate in cognitive neuroscience at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Pavia (2014–2017). She carried out clinical and research activities at the Maugeri Clinical-Scientific Institute of Bari, Italy. She has been a visiting scholar at the NARU – University of Manchester and a junior research fellow at the IBFM-National Research Council, Milan. Here, she improved her skills in the identification of early biomarkers for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using artificial intelligence methods. She has been a research fellow at the Neurodegenerative Diseases Unit, University of Bari, where she expanded her clinical understanding of AD, frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), and PPA.
Awards & Honors
Featured Publications
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