Rate My Professor Maaike Vandermosten

Maaike Vandermosten is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven, serving as Tenure Track Professor in the Department of Neurosciences. She heads the Speech & Language Research group within the Research Group Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology. She obtained her Master's degree in Speech and Language Pathology and Audiology from the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven in 2007 and her PhD in Psychology and Educational Sciences, in collaboration with the Departments of Radiology and Neuroscience, from KU Leuven in 2012. From 2012 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, the University of California San Francisco, and Maastricht University. She is a member of the KU Leuven Brain Institute and the Leuven Interdisciplinary Language Institute. Vandermosten teaches courses such as Zorgtraject verworven spraak en taal, Masterclass neurologische taal en spraak, cognitie en slikken, and others related to clinical logopedics.

Her research centers on the neurobiological basis of language, with a focus on speech perception, reading, phonological processing, and disorders including developmental dyslexia and post-stroke aphasia. She employs psychophysical experiments, longitudinal neuroimaging techniques like diffusion MRI for white matter correlates, functional MVPA analyses, high-resolution structural imaging, and natural speech paradigms to study neuroplasticity, connectivity, and early biomarkers for language outcomes in children and stroke patients. Key publications include 'A qualitative and quantitative review of diffusion tensor imaging studies in reading and dyslexia' (2012), 'The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia' (2026, Journal of Neuroscience), 'Schooling shapes the brain: neural specialization for words and numbers in early childhood' (2026), 'Screening for Developmental Language Disorder in Bilingual Children Using an Iconic Gesture Comprehension Task' (2026, Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools), and 'Behavioral constructs and neural correlates of descriptive and responsive speech in post-stroke aphasia' (2026, Cortex). Her contributions advance understanding of developmental and acquired language impairments through neuroimaging and behavioral measures.