Stephen Wilson received his BA in Linguistics from the University of Sydney and spent several years carrying out fieldwork and documenting an endangered Australian Aboriginal language called Wagiman. He received an MA in Linguistics and a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA. In his dissertation work, he used functional neuroimaging to study the neural basis of speech perception and developed statistical methods to examine relationships between tissue damage and resulting behavioral deficits in aphasic stroke patients.

Dr. Wilson is interested in the functional neuroanatomy of language and how language breaks down when its neural substrates are damaged. Since joining the Memory and Aging Center in 2007, he has studied patients with progressive non-fluent aphasia, semantic dementia and logopenic progressive aphasia using structural and functional imaging, along with behavioral measures that characterize language deficits. The goal of this research is to enable earlier and more accurate differential diagnoses.