[3] She completed postgraduate research and study in neuropsychology at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
[4] For her PhD[5] in neuropsychology she used structural image analysis to study the KE family, who have a severe motor speech disorder and a mutation in the FOXP2 gene.
[9][10] She completed a randomized controlled trial that demonstrated that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) can be used to enhance fluency in people who stutter.
[citation needed] tDCS involves passing a small current through the brain, and could be used in combination with speech training to make more permanent improvements to fluency.
[9] It increases the firing rate of neurons in brain regions that Watkins has identified as important in speech disorder.