Sunday, September 03, 2006

Main speakers of plenary


Dr. Gerald Maguire is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine. He is a member of the US national stuttering association (NSA) and currently serves on its research advisory board. As a person who stutters himself, he has been interested in investigating novel treatments for stuttering since early in his medical training. His research group was the first to investigate brain differences in stutterers using the PET brain imaging method. He was the lead investigator on many studies investigating medications for the treatment of stuttering. At the Telford BSA conference, he will also talk about the latest trial on Pagoclone. Dr Maguire has spoken at a wide range of conferences like NSA, World Congress of Stuttering and ASHA. His research appeared at news outlets like the LA Times, NPR, ABC News, and the Boston Globe.

Dr. Dennis Drayna is a senior researcher in genetics at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he currently serves as a Section Chief in the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. His primary research interests are the genetics of human communication disorders, work that has taken him to eight different countries on four continents in pursuit of families with these disorders. For example, he collected blood samples from an extended Pakistani family where many of its members stutter. At the Telford BSA conference, Dr. Drayna will discuss his latest research, and also collect blood samples from volunteers for his research work. He did a PhD at Harvard University, worked as a postdoctoral fellowship in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Utah, and then spent 14 years in the biotechnology industry in the San Francisco Bay area.

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