Arnold School of Public Health professor Julius Fridriksson was awarded an $11.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his research on strokes, according to a university release. The money from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders will go towards the creation of the Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery at Carolina.
Fridriksson specializes in the effects of strokes on communication — including aphasia, a impairment of language caused by damage to the brain that affects more than one-third of stroke victims.
The grant will fund four specific projects that include working with chronic patients and those who have just had strokes as well as building recovery models and studying speech and language models. The work will utilize scans from USC's McCausland Center for Brain Imaging.
Fridriksson will work with fellow USC researchers Dirk den Ouden, Chris Rorden, Rutvik Desai and Souvik Sen on the projects as well as Johns Hopkins University, the University of California Irvine and the Medical University of South Carolina. Fridriksson is a 15-year veteran of the Arnold School.