What a year! In 2025, our laboratory published 7 scientific papers, welcomed 16 new members, and collected data from 149 different individuals. All of this took place within the ever-dynamic context of a university laboratory, with its constant arrivals and departures, teaching responsibilities, and the ongoing race for research funding. 💼🧠 Our mission? To advance knowledge about the brain, aging, and language. At the start of this new year, let’s take a moment to celebrate what we accomplished in 2025. 🎯✨

  • We published 7 papers in international scientific journals, as well as one book chapter. One article is currently under review, and we are currently working on 8 additional articles that will be submitted to scientific journals in 2026.
  • Most of the articles we published are accompanied by the release of the associated dataset, in the spirit of open science. You can consult our data on the Boréalis platform by clicking here.
  • Xiyue successfully defended her doctoral thesis in neuroscience in June. Congratulations, Xiyue!!
  • David and Sarah-Ève successfully passed their doctoral exam in April and December, respectively. Congratulations to both!
  • The laboratory’s students received 7 competitive scholarships from CIHR (Amélie), FRQS (Amélie), the Research Chair on Aging (Roxane), NeuroQuébec (Marc-André), CRBLM (Maélie), and Université Laval (Marc-André). Marc-André was also a finalist for the prestigious Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholarship.
  • Pascale obtained a grant from the Grammy Foundation and one from the Singwell group and submitted a grant application to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
  • We delivered 17 scientific presentations: the lab’s students gave 8 poster presentations (Alexandre, Marc-André, Maélie, Amélie, and Kellyane) and 6 oral presentations (David, Amélie, Marc-André, and Maélie), and Pascale gave 3 invited talks.
  • We welcomed 16 new members:
    • Maélie and Kellyane, winter interns;
    • Charlie, research assistant in the winter;
    • Maélie, returning as a Master’s student in Rehabilitation Science starting in the summer;
    • Shani-Li, summer intern, then research assistant in the fall;
    • Marie-Hélène, research assistant since the summer;
    • Marianne and Bélinda, fall interns;
    • Marc-André, who began a PhD in Rehabilitation Science in the fall;
    • Ariane, Jade, Élodie, Lisa, Sarah, and Amélie, Master’s students in Speech-Language Pathology under Pascale’s supervision;
    • Valérie returned as a research associate starting in the fall.
  • We continued data collection for our major NeuroSPiN project, funded by CIHR.
  • We launched the first phase of our new MELODIC project and completed the 30 group activity sessions with an incredible 0% attrition rate!!!!! Thank you to Alexandre, Maélie, and the entire project team.
  • We completed data collection for a project on speech production in aging (the Repetition project), in collaboration with a professor from UQTR, Édith Durand.
  • Data analyses are currently underway in 8 projects: NeuroSPiN (David, Sarah-Ève, Valérie, Lisa, Sarah, and Amélie), EEG-TMS (Pascale), PICCOLO (Alexandre), Chorale-Drummond (Amélie), database study (Roxane), Aging of Speech Production (Marie-Hélène, Nathan, Pascale), MELODIC (Maélie, Alexandre, Ariane, Jade, Élodie, Shani-Li), and Repetition (Marc-André, Édith, Pascale).
  • In total, we welcomed 149 different participants to the lab, for a total of 470 data collection sessions (including one crazy day in October during which 11 MRI sessions were conducted, along with one phone interview and one in-lab data collection session!).
  • Most participants came to the lab more than once during a project, and some took part in more than one project. In total:
    • 68 individuals participated in the NeuroSPiN project. This represents 41 cognitive assessments, 38 communication + EEG assessments, and 49 MRI sessions. Grand total of 128 data collection sessions for this project in 2025!
    • 44 individuals participated in the Repetition project on speech production in aging (1 session per participant, including a cognitive assessment, a communication assessment, and one MRI session).
    • 38 individuals participated in the MELODIC project, totaling 103 MRI sessions, 101 in-lab data collection sessions (cognition and EEG), and 94 phone interviews assessing psychosocial quality of life. Grand total of sessions for this project in 2025: 298! In addition to these sessions, we organized 30 group activity sessions lasting 2.5 hours each.
  • We published 22 original blog posts; several lab members contributed to this knowledge mobilization effort (Pascale, Alexandre, Marie-Hélène, Charlie, Valérie, Maélie, Xiyue, and Mélissa). Our blog posts are available in both French and English.
  • We were pleased to welcome 41 new followers to our Facebook page, increasing from 1,485 to 1,526! Thank you all for your interest in the lab!
  • Peer review work is essential to academic research, and Pascale devoted significant energy to it in 2025. As Associate Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (MIT Press), she handled around thirty manuscripts. The biggest challenge? Finding reviewers! She also chaired the FRQS Junior 1 Research Scholars committee and served on several other committees: NSERC (OIR), CEPITO (the interdisciplinary committee of the Three Councils), CFI, and the Scientific Committee of the Drummond Foundation.
  • Pascale completed her role as Director of the Graduate Research Program at the School of Rehabilitation after four very full years. She continues her involvement as co-lead of the “Linguistic and Musical Plasticity” axis within the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM).

A huge thank you to everyone who made these achievements possible! 🙏

We would like to warmly thank all lab members for their rigorous work throughout the year. A special thank you as well to our participants, our research collaborators (in particular Maude Desjardins, Carol Hudon, Isabelle Peretz, Frank Russo, Joël Macoir, Brad Postle, Anthony Dick, Édith Durand, Monika Molnar, Andréanne Sharp, Pascale Bédard, and Alexis Piéplu), the team at the CERVO MRI Center 🧠 (Céline Leclerc, Director, and Daphnée Lesage, technologist), the staff of the CERVO Research Center and Université Laval 🏫, and all the other people who supported us in our projects. Your support and involvement truly make all the difference. Thank you! 🌟

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