Fama Aphasia Recovery Lab

Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

The George Washington University

Director: Mackenzie Fama, PhD, CCC-SLP

About

The Fama Aphasia Recovery (FAR) Lab is directed by Mackenzie Fama, PhD, CCC-SLP, a speech-language pathologist and cognitive neuroscientist. We are housed in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the George Washington University. The overall mission of the FAR Lab is to improve language recovery and quality of life for people with aphasia and related communication disorders. In our work, we use a combination of subjective and objective research methodologies to increase our understanding of stroke survivors’ own experiences of living with aphasia. To learn more, please read about our current projects.

If you are interested in becoming involved as a research assistant or research participant, please click the “Contact us” button above. We look forward to hearing from you!

Commitment to Antiracism

The FAR Lab is committed to an environment of antiracism, in which we are actively working to dismantle systems of oppression that negatively affect the Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. We acknowledge that the presence of systemic racism in healthcare and education settings may negatively impact our research participants as well as members of our research team. We actively work to foster an equitable and inclusive environment through the following:

  1. Designing and executing our studies in collaboration with a diverse, representative team of researchers, speech-language pathologists, people with aphasia, and other community stakeholders;

  2. Applying our knowledge of sociolinguistics and dialect variation in order to make our research tools equitable for all participants;

  3. Reading and citing papers by diverse authors, including work on education and health disparities;

  4. Having a zero tolerance policy for racist behavior in the lab and speaking out against racist behavior when we witness it elsewhere; and

  5. Acknowledging our own implicit biases and limiting the ways in which these biases may impact our work.

Please also see the Statement on Antiracism from the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at The George Washington University.

Land Acknowledgment

The FAR Lab is located on the main campus of The George Washington University, at the intersection of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. We honor and respect this land, which is the traditional homeland of the Nacotchtank (Anacostan) and Piscataway peoples.