Chris Rorden

University of South Carolina

rorden@sc.edu 

Chris Rorden holds the Endowed Chair in Neuroimaging at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Psychology. He co-directs the McCausland Center for Brain Imaging. He leads Neuroimaging Core of the Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery (C-STAR) which oversees the acquisition, processing and analysis of MRI data from all of the clinical sites. He also leads the C-STAR research project  ‘Combining behavior, neuroimaging and biomarkers to predict language deficits after stroke’. This work aims to improve the diagnosis, prognosis and guided treatment of aphasia. Chris began trained as an undergraduate at the University of California in San Diego before completing a PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in England. He then worked as a post-doctoral scientist at Birkbeck College, the British Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and at University College London. He has previously served as a tenured faculty member at the University of Nottingham and Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently holds adjunct positions at Favaloro University and University of Tübingen. A hallmark of his work is a close collaboration with clinicians, using recent advances in brain imaging and brain stimulation to understand medically significant questions. He has developed some of the most popular tools in his field for visualizing and analyzing these data (for example MRIcroGL, Surf Ice and dcm2nii). These tools are all made freely available, allowing other teams to exploit these methods. Beyond, the C-STAR work, Chris is also interested in the perceptual impairments often seen following injury to the right side of the brain. This work is in collaboration with Otto Karnath. He is also interested in the consequences of epilepsy in collaboration with Leonardo Bonilha.