Associate Professor Frédérique Liégeois

Associate Professor Frédérique Liégeois is a cognitive neuroscientist and head of the Clinical System Neuroscience Section at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (London, UK), one of the world's leading institutions in paediatric research. Her work focusses on unravelling the neural bases of inherited and acquired speech and language disorders, using advanced structural, functional and diffusion MRI approaches.

She has developed a method to identify speech motor pathways on MRI, and shown that their damage predicts impairments in a range of childhood conditions (e.g. The Journal of Pediatrics, 2018). Together with Professor Morgan, she has co-authored several reviews on the brain basis of child speech disorders (e.g. Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 2016) and treatments for childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) (Cochrane review, 2018).

Frédérique is particularly known for her seminal papers on the neural phenotype of CAS caused by mutations in the FOXP2 gene (e.g. landmark paper on the KE family in Nature Neuroscience, 2003; Scientific Reports, 2016). Her current work expands to cases and families with CAS of unknown origin, revealing subtle brain differences and new pathways (Brain, 2019).