Vedika Venkataramanan

Vedika Venkataramanan

Biography

Vedika Venkataramanan is a rising junior in the Lampe Joint Department of BME at NC State
and UNC-Chapel Hill, concentrating in pharmacoengineering and biosignals and imaging, with a
minor in Spanish. A classically trained Kathak dancer, she approaches problems by finding new
movement within rigid structures, an instinct channeled into her research at UNC-SOM, where she
builds ML pipelines for early ASD diagnosis via rs-fMRI. As an HHMI SURP Fellow at UCSF’s
Cheng Lab, she studied chromatin remodeling implicated in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases;
her research interests center on electroacoustic mechanisms for early-intervention strategies to
address sensory deprivation-driven degradation, particularly hearing loss. Driven to design for
accessibility, she leads NC State’s CATCH chapter, designing adaptive toys and, through the HHP
Project, a device enabling children with symbrachydactyly to play on monkey bars. She founded
CorSentra, a wearable mitigating cardiac death risk in diabetics, and aspires to pursue a JD-PhD,
shaping therapeutic development to advance health equity.

Right-Hemisphere Candidate White-Matter Tracts in RD
Vedika Venkataramanan1, Somya Mittal2, and John D. E. Gabrieli2,3
1Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, North Carolina State University and
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
2Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard Medical School
3Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Reading difficulties (RD) are associated with differences in canonical left-lateralized reading
networks, yet reading outcomes vary substantially among affected children. Right-hemisphere (RH)
white-matter organization is a candidate neural mechanism for this variability. Prior work using
diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) show conflicting associations between major white-matter tracts
and reading scores: right superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) integrity has been linked to
longitudinal reading gains rather than concurrent reading ability (Hoeft et al., 2011), rightward
inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF) lateralization has been associated with poorer reading
outcomes (Zhao et al., 2016), and findings on the arcuate fasciculus (AF) remain inconsistent
(Auwera et al., 2021). To test the replicability of prior results and understand how RH structure
affects reading development, we examined correlations within and between subjects, extracting
DWI-derived tract-averaged fractional anisotropy (FA), mean, radial, and axial diffusivity in 79
children ages 7-10 (TD = 27, RD = 45). We predict that after controlling for demographics and
global FA, RH SLF and AF diffusion metrics will correlate positively with pseudoword decoding,
while RH IFOF lateralization correlates negatively with single-word reading in RD. We will run
exploratory analyses to determine relationships between white-matter and reading ability to better
understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying reading improvement.