Elettra Casellato

Email: edec@leeds.ac.uk
Thesis title: The Acquisition of Multiple Languages in Children who are deaf, wear Cochlear Implants and grow up in Plurilingual Contexts
Supervisor: Professor Ruth Swanwick, Dr Edward Killan

Profile

Born and raised in a family originally from South Tyrol, Italy, I grew up in a peculiar multicultural environment. After completing a BA in Psychology and Behavioural Science at the University of Bologna (2015), attended an MSc in Neuroscience at the University of Trento. After the first year, I was awarded an Overseas Study Scholarship for academic merits that allowed me to spend one semester at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where I attended highly specialistic modules and training (e.g. a Neuroanatomy course held in the University Hospital morgue, a Neuropsychological Test Assessment training and a Neuropsychopharmacology module, among others).
Back in Italy, I worked as a research intern at the Center for Neurocognitive Rehabilitation linked to the Interdepartmental Center for Mind and Brain in Trento (Italy) for a semester. While there, I worked with one of the Neurolinguistics research groups on a project investigating marked difficulties in specific types of sentences in Aphasic patients. Having always been fascinated by the topic of Deafness and Hearing Loss, I graduated in March 2020 with a Thesis in Neuroethics titled "Can Cochlear Implants be seen as a form of Cognitive enhancement? A Neuroethical comparison".

During my 28 years on Earth, I relocated multiple times to make possible and/or follow my academic aspirations. This has led me to live for prolonged periods of time in Italy, Ireland, Australia, Belgium and, now, the UK.

I am currently one of the two Early-Stage Researchers in Childhood Deafness and Communication Research based in Leeds, as part of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) and Comm4CHILD project, together with my colleague Nathalie Czeke.

Research interests

Due to the nature of my studies, my interests predominantly lie in the Neuroscience domain, specifically:

Deafness
Brain plasticity after Cochlear Implantation
Neurolinguistics – focusing on plurilingualism in both spoken and Sign Language(s)
Neurological and Neurodegenerative diseases (especially Parkinson's Disease and Huntington's Disease)

I am also very fond of Statistics, Neuroanatomy, Neuroethics, Behavioural Analysis and the observation of the underlining sociological effects that may influence any scientific research.

Qualifications

MSc Neuroscience
BA Psychology and Behavioural Science

Research groups and institutes

ICY: Inclusion, Childhood & Youth Research Centre
Centre for Language Education