Shalom Kim Henderson is the first graduate of MGH Institute of Health Professions to receive the prestigious Gates-Cambridge Scholarship.
Henderson, who graduated in 2018 with a Master of Science in speech-language pathology with a concentration in adult neurogenic communications disorders, is among 28 U.S. students who received the scholarship this year. The award will cover tuition and living expenses for four years, worth approximately $250,000, while she pursues a PhD in medical science at the University of Cambridge in England beginning in the fall of 2020.
At Cambridge, she will focus on determining ways to better understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying semantic cognition in patients diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration and its subtypes, such as primary progressive aphasia (PPA), which has no cure and is often misdiagnosed. Specifically, she will study how word meaning is stored and accessed in the brain, and the nature of impairments that can result when crucial brain regions are affected by disease, as in PPA.
“I’m excited because I’ll be able to continue working with this population with various neuroimaging tools that speech pathologists generally don’t get the opportunity to use in schools and medical settings,” said Henderson, who since graduating from the Institute has worked in the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, focusing on speech and language issues in PPA. “There’s a big gap in the literature about understanding what’s happening in the brain before and after being diagnosed with PPA, and I want to help inform targeted interventions. Plus, this will allow me to continue the research I’ve been doing at Mass General.”
Henderson graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a dual degree in English and biology and completed postgraduate studies in linguistics and psychology from Harvard University and Columbia University in 2014 and 2016, respectively. At the Institute, she received the Kenneth N. Stevens Student Research Award and her master’s thesis, “Immediate and delayed auditory feedback in declarative learning,” was published as a first-authored paper.
The Gates-Cambridge program, in addition to choosing scholars with outstanding academic achievement, emphasizes social leadership as part of its selection process in order to create a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others. Established through a $210 million donation to the University of Cambridge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the program has funded more than 1,700 scholars from over 100 countries who represent more than 600 universities globally, including over 200 in the U.S.