2025 Sensory Symposium Speakers

Virginia Spielmann (she/her), PhD, OTR/L 

A smiling fair-skinned woman with short light-brown hair, wearing rectangular glasses and a delicate multi‑chain necklace over a black top. They’re photographed from the shoulders up against a softly blurred indoor background featuring a framed picture on the wall. The circular frame of the image is edged with a colorful, rainbow-inspired border.Executive Director
STAR Institute
USA
Host

Virginia is a well-travelled speaker, coach and educator on topics including sensory integration, DIR/Floortime, child development and infant mental health. She has conducted trainings in Kenya, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and the USA and leads workshops at international conferences.

Virginia is a founder and former Clinical Director of SPOT (Speech, Physical, and Occupational Therapy) Interdisciplinary Children's Therapy Center in Hong Kong, where she led a large and widely respected inter-disciplinary team.

Virginia obtained her BSc in Occupational Therapy in Oxford England (2002) and her Masters in Occupational Therapy from Mount Mary University, Milwaukee (2018). She is a DIR/Floortime Training Leader and Expert and clinical consultant for the Interdisciplinary Council for Development and Learning (ICDL). Her extensive pediatric experience includes children on the autism spectrum, as well as those with Sensory Processing Disorder, infant mental health issues, adoption, developmental trauma.

Virginia has considerable post-graduate training, she is certified on the SIPT and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Infant and Early Childhood Development with an emphasis on mental health, with Fielding Graduate University, in Santa Barbara. She is a published author and contributed to the STAR Frame of Reference as part of the 4th Edition of Frames of Reference for Pediatric Occupational Therapy, alongside Dr. Miller and Dr. Schoen.

Portrait of a woman with medium-brown skin and short gray hair, smiling in a pink blazer. Set against a gray background with a colorful circular border.

Brigit M. Carter (she/her), PhD, RN, FAAN
Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer
American Association of Colleges in Nursing (AACN)
USA

Dr. Brigit Carter, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer, joined the American Association of Colleges in Nursing (AACN) in February 2023. She is Professor Emerita at the Duke University School of Nursing, where she served as the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion from 2018-2023. From 2015-2018, she served as the Director of the DUSON Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program. Her current educational research is focused on understanding the experiences of students with microaggressions and the development of strategies to mitigate the impact of microaggressions. She focuses on strategies to increase historically marginalized students in nursing and understand individual-level social determinants that are barriers to achieving nursing education. 

Dr. Carter is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing, an Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity, and a Duke Teaching for Equity fellow. 

Dr. Carter retired from the U. S. Navy as a Commander after 28 years of service in January 2018. 

Smiling woman with pale skin and straight chestnut-brown hair, wearing a green top. Set against a soft outdoor background, framed in a multicolor circle.

Karen Gravett (she/her), PhD
Associate Professor
University of Surrey
United Kingdom

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Associate Head (Research) at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is a member of the Society for Research in Higher Education Governing Council, a member of the editorial board for Teaching in Higher Education, and Learning, Media and Technology, and Associate Editor for Sociology. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K. (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K. (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education. 

Portrait of a smiling fair-skinned woman with dark shoulder-length hair, wearing glasses and a white top, set against a light background, surrounded by a colorful circular border.

Livia Tomova (she/her), PhD
Assistant Professor in Psychology
Cardiff University
United Kingdom

Social connection is central for health and well-being in humans, especially during the formative developmental period of adolescence. How do experiences of social disconnection, such as social stress, loneliness and social isolation, impact the brain and mind of young people? And how does engagement with digital technologies, such as social media use, impact young people and their social relationships? 

My research explores these questions using different methods such as behavioural experiments, neuroimaging in combination with multivariate analysis methods (e.g., multi-voxel pattern analysis, MVPA), and secondary analyses of large-scale longitudinal data. 

My PhD research at University of Vienna (completed in 2016) focused on the effects of acute stress on social cognition and the underlying brain processes. My dissertation received the Austrian Award of Excellence for best Austrian Dissertations in 2016. I then completed three years of postdoctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT investigating how the lack of social connection is represented in the human brain (Tomova et al. 2020, Nature Neuroscience). In 2020, I was awarded a Henslow Research Fellowship at Cambridge Universityduring which I studied the effects of isolation and loneliness on adolescent cognition. In April 2024 I started my position as Assistant Professor in Psychology at Cardiff University. 

Outside of work I enjoy spending my time with my 18 months old daugther and reading science fiction books.