About Us
The Founder
Sara Smiley is a board-certified speech and cognitive pathologist with more than two decades of experience treating individuals across that span. She has practiced in every major clinical setting including acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, outpatient clinics, home health, pediatrics, early intervention, and private practice. This broad clinical foundation allows her to evaluate and treat complex communication, cognitive, swallowing, and neuro-behavioral disorders from a whole-brain, neuro-developmental perspective.
Throughout her career, Sara has become recognized as an expert in neuro-development, cognitive retraining, and mild traumatic brain injury, working with infants, children, adults, and geriatric populations. Her work spans head trauma, neurological disease, developmental disorders, post-surgical communication needs, feeding and swallowing issues, and complex cases where cognitive or behavioral changes remain unexplained by imaging or traditional medical testing.
Sara specializes in identifying the subtle, functional deficits that MRIs and CT scans cannot detect. She evaluates cognitive systems piece by piece; attention, memory, executive function, processing speed, language, motor speech, swallow, sensory regulation; and determines which neurological pathways are disrupted and how these impairments affect daily life.
Her extensive training includes advanced methodologies such as PROMPT, LSVT, VitalStim, cognitive-communication rehabilitation, neuro-motor re-patterning, and multiple evidence-based approaches for developmental and acquired disorders. She has supervised clinicians, developed clinical programs, trained interdisciplinary teams, and served as a specialist in both neurological and developmental rehabilitation.
Through the M.I.N.D., Sara integrates standardized cognitive testing, individualized therapy, and detailed clinical documentation to support both medical recovery and legal clarity. Her treatment model produces objective, functional evidence that aligns patient experience with neurological reality, supporting families, medical teams, and attorneys who require accurate insight into cognitive and communication changes.
Sara’s mission is simple: to reveal what standard tests miss and help patients reclaim the patterns of thinking, communicating, and functioning that shape their lives.
The M.I.N.D.
The M.I.N.D. (Mind-Shape Institute for Neuro-Depatterning) was founded to provide clear, functional evidence of cognitive, communication, speech, voice, and swallowing changes following injury — especially in cases where MRI or CT imaging appears normal but symptoms persist.
We specialize in evaluating the real-world systems of the brain that determine how a person thinks, speaks, remembers, organizes, processes information, communicates, and functions day to day. This includes:
• Speech clarity and motor-speech control
• Language comprehension and expression
• Cognitive domains such as memory, attention, processing speed, and executive functioning
• Voice and breath support
• Swallowing and airway protection
• Sensory load and cognitive tolerance
Our mission is simple:
To reveal what changed, why it changed, and how it affects the client’s functional capacity.
We provide standardized, legally defensible testing; individualized treatment plans based on true clinical need; and ongoing documentation that supports neurologists, psychologists, case managers, and testifying experts. Our clinical notes offer objective, functional evidence that helps attorneys understand the client’s neurological patterns and support claims not visible on imaging.
The M.I.N.D. Institute bridges the gap between medical imaging and lived experience, delivering the functional clarity required in today’s complex injury cases.