What is your role in the lab? 

I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and most of my days are spent on the lab’s precision MRI project which looks at the motor network for speech in people who stutter at the level of the individual rather than the group. I’m also part of the digital musical rhythm games project where we’re building a game to train rhythm and timing and testing whether it facilitates speech fluency in children who stutter.

What excites you most about your work?

Two things. The first is working at the level of the individual. A group-average map belongs to no one; an individual map belongs to the person who was in the scanner, and that is where stuttering actually happens. The second is that this isn’t mapping for its own sake. Existing treatments are limited and don’t work for everyone, and I want our work to end in something a person who stutters can use.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies?

I play a lot of tennis, the piano, and the pipa, a Chinese plucked lute. Most of my remaining time goes to the kitchen, where I like to be creative with recipes. Friends call the results “Ci-Jun Cuisine.”

If you could learn one new skill overnight, what would you want it to be?

How to talk with a young child who stutters the way our speech-language pathologists do. It matters because a listener who rushes or reacts adds time pressure to a system that’s already struggling with timing, and a child who senses that adults are uncomfortable learns to say less. I spend most of my day with the brain’s wiring. I’d like to be good at the part where there’s an actual child who stutters in the room.

Besides the unknowns around stuttering, what’s another scientific mystery that you find interesting?

Why stuttering almost disappears when a person sings. It’s one of the oldest observations in the field, and we still don’t have the mechanism. During my PhD I ran into the same puzzle from the other side: when identical visual symbols were cued as either music or language, the musical version traveled through largely the same cortical territory, only faster. The brain seems to treat the same material differently depending on what it is told the material is. If a beat can carry speech past whatever is blocking it, I’d like to understand exactly what the beat is doing.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

I’m still figuring out how the mapping work and the intervention work fit together—whether what we see in an individual’s brain can actually tell us who will benefit from what. That’s the question I’d most like to be able to answer in the future.