Language Sciences Talks - Dr. Lena Palaniyappan on “Automated speech analysis in mental illnesses and the most likely near-term applications.”
October 17, 2023, 11:00 am to 12:00 pm
Join us at Kenny 4001, Douglas T. Kenny building on Tuesday, October 17, 2023, from 11:00am - 12:00pm for the next Language Science Talk featuring Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. This event will be hybrid.
Please use the Zoom details below to attend virtually:
Zoom Link: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/63480154925?pwd=SElzWWFFbnN6Kzk2QnYvVkkzcG5lUT09
Meeting ID: 634 8015 4925
Passcode: 153605
Title: Automated speech analysis in mental illnesses and the most likely near-term applications
Abstract:
TBA
Speaker bio:
Dr. Lena Palaniyappan (pronounced as PALA – NEE – APEN, a Tamil name) works with patients and families experiencing early stages of severe mental illnesses such as psychosis. He is the inaugural director of the Centre for Youth Mental Health at the Douglas Institute, McGill University and holds the Bourgeois Chair in Developmental Disorders at the McGill University. His research group, Neuroimaging and Mental Illnesses in Youth (NIMY) has its base at two Canadian medical schools: one at the Robarts Research Institute at the Schulich School of Medicine, Western University, London, Ontario and the other at McGill’s Faculty of Medicine, Montreal, Quebec.
The intense restlessness caused by a brief exposure to 3 days of haloperidol (an antipsychotic medication) as a medical student at Stanley Medical College (Chennai, India) sparked his career in psychiatry. Following a concurrent bachelor’s degree in psychology, which he completed along with his medical studies, he then pursued a Masters and then a PhD in Translational Neuroimaging at the University of Nottingham, UK, with Prof. Peter Liddle.
The major emphasis of his research is to modify the pathways that lead to poor long-term outcomes in individuals with serious mental disorders that often start in adolescence. Relevant to today’s talk, he convenes “DISCOURSE in Psychosis”, an international research consortium with 210 interdisciplinary members, all interested in the domain of language in psychotic disorders. This consortium is working towards creating a 'speech bank' with several thousands of patient speech samples collected using a shared protocol, to enable a fuller understanding of speech markers relevant to mental illnesses.