Biography

USC Vice President for Research Julius Fridriksson has for years been a prominent member of the USC research community, serving as a faculty member in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the Arnold School of Public Health since 2001 and as SmartState Endowed Chair of Memory and Brain Function, directing the SMARTBrain™ Center, since 2016. He also co-directs the cutting-edge USC McCausland Center for Brain Imaging.

Fridriksson built his research portfolio from the ground up over many years, studying post-stroke neuroscience, and managing a growing, thriving team of researchers. These efforts have culminated in the interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery, or C-STAR, now in its second round of successful, competitive funding through the National Institutes of Health. Collaboration is at the heart of C-STAR’s mission. The center focuses on four projects, including two here at USC, one at Johns Hopkins University and one at the University of California, Irvine. Each project examines a different aspect of aphasia, a communication disorder characterized by difficulty understanding and/or generating speech that results from damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, often caused by a stroke.