Hi Rick:
Thanks for your response! The identity solution seems completely reasonable, thank you for suggesting it.
I was having issues aligning my T1 to my EPI. Daniel suggested that the skullstrip was, ironically, doing TOO GOOD of a job and removing some CSF that could have been used to better align my EPI so the solution was a dilated version of skullstrip. However, I have performed both this tactic as well as SSWarper and the statistical results for some of my participants come out very similar. I may end up using the SSWarper version of the script templates except in cases where there are alignment issues and then I can insert the identity as you suggested.
Thank you again for your suggestion as well as for everything else!
Lauren