Ajay Halai, PhD

I am a research associate within the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) at the University of Manchester (2014-present).

I am currently managing a post-stroke aphasia database at the University of Manchester, which is primarily used for large scale data analysis and includes a large neuropsychological test battery and extensive neuroimaging data.

I am currently working as a research associate at the University of Manchester on post-stroke aphasia.

I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Dr Stephen Welbourne (primary), Dr Laura Parkes, Prof Matthew Lambon Ralph and Prof Geoffrey Parker. My thesis was entitled "Multimodal imaging of brain networks subserving speech comprehension", where I gained skills working on simultaneous EEG-fMRI, diffusion weighted imaging and advanced fMRI data acquisition methods.

During my MSc and BSc, I was mainly interested in face processing at the University of York where I worked under the supervision of Prof Andy Young and Dr Timonthy Andrews. I conducted 2 experiments during my studies; 1) fMRI adaptation paradigm, and 2) MEG event-related potentials and source analysis.

Prof. Matthew Lambon Ralph

Dr Anna Woollams

Dr Paul Conroy

Dr Stephen Welbourne

Dr Laura Parkes

Dr Geoffrey Parker

Reem Al-Yahya (PhD student)

Ying Zhao (PhD student)

Natalie Busby (PhD student)

British Neuropsychological Society

Society for the Neurobiology of Language

Society for Neuroscience

Organisation of Human Brain Mapping

fMRI (task-related and rest)

EEG/MEG (ERPs, source analysis and frequency analysis)

Diffusion weighted imaging

Structural and functional connectivity analyses

Data reduction methods (PCA, ICA, etc)

Combining methodologies (EEG-fMRI; PCA-VBCM)

PhD Psychology (University of Manchester)

MSc Cognitive Neuroscience (University of York)

BSc Psychology (University of York)

I am currently working on understanding how neural damage post stroke can result in specific behavioural deficits. In particular, I make use of advanced mathematical techniques to tackle large scale behavioural and neuroimaging data (such as combining principle component analysis with lesion correlation methodology). I am making use of multimodal data (high resolution T1-weighted, diffusion-weighted, resting-state fMRI), in order to build a predictive model that can accurately estimate specific behavioural scores based purely on neuroimaging measures.