People

Faculty

	Shihab Shamma, Director
	Ph.D., Stanford University, 1980 Research Interests: Dr. Shamma’s research deals with the question of how the acoustic signal is represented at various levels of the mammalian auditory system. The research spans a wide range of disciplines and techniques, ranging from theoretical models of auditory processing the early and central auditory stages, to neurophysiological investigations of the auditory cortex, to psychoacoustical experiments of human perception of acoustic spectral profiles. These studies complement each other in that theoretical models are directly based on experimental data, and in turn the models motivates the experimental paradigms and analysis.

	Jonathan Fritz, Research Scientist
	Ph.D., Brown University, 1995 Research Interest: The two broad topics of Dr. Fritz's current research are: (1) task-related adaptive plasticity in auditory processing with a current focus of interest on behavioral physiology studies of ferret (and monkey) primary and secondary auditory cortices, and top-down influence of prefrontal cortex. (2) neurobiology of auditory perception and memory, including psychophysical studies in the ferret at NSL, perceptual and behavioral lesion studies in the monkey at NIH with Mort Mishkin, PET and fMRI imaging studies of auditory processing in collaboration with Al Braun at NIH.

John Rinzel, Visiting Professor

Ph.D., New York University, 1973

Research Interests: Rinzel's research involves computational/theoretical modeling of various neuronal systems and covers a range of abstraction levels, from detailed biophysical cell-based models to mean-field models of networks. Of particular focus in the auditory system are: 1) using in vitro electrophysiology and modeling, to understand the biophysical mechanisms in the auditory brain stem that underlie sound localization; 2) using psychophysics and modeling, to gain insight into aspects of auditory streaming, currently, that involve ambiguous stimuli.

	Collaborators
		Catherine Carr
		Timmer Horiuchi
		P. S. Krishnaprasad
		Cynthia Moss
		David Poeppel
		Jonathan Simon

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Pingbo Yin

Ph.D., Institute of Physiology, Chinese Academy of Science, 1995

Research Interests: My primary research interests focus on understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie auditory perception and memory.

The fundamental questions pursued are: how the sounds are perceived in auditory system? How the sounds perceived are encoded into memory? And how the sounds encoded in memory affects the sound perceiving? The ongoing behavioral neurophysiology studies are focusing on: 1) Neuronal correlates of auditory stream segregation and top-down effects (such as attention, memory) on stream segregation in primary auditory cortex; 2) Neuronal basis of rapid STRF changes occurred in the auditory system during auditory pattern discrimination (such as melody or tonal sequence).

Dan Winkowski

Ph.D., Temple University, 2003

Research Interests: I am interested in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying attention. In the lab, I use a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological approaches to 1) study the role of the auditory cortex in representing acoustic stimuli and 2) understand how higher order processes, like attention, can modify these representations.

Bernhard Englitz

Ph.D., Max Planck Institute, 2009

Research Interests: My interests are in computational neuroscience, population decoding of percepts and many channel, chronic recordings during behavior. At NSL I have developed recording soft- and hardware to address the last point and am in the process of acquiring behavioral data for bistable sequences of Shepard tones, which are octave-spaced complex tones. Previously, I have endeavored into synaptic transmission and neural encoding in the brainstem in the MNTB and AVCN.

Nik Francis

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011

Research Interests: I study how the nervous system enables listening. In the NSL, I use electrophysiology to measure neural plasticity during changes in perceptual goals, acoustic contexts and task difficulties. The aim of my work is to understand the physiological basis of auditory attention.

Graduate Students

	Kevin Donaldson
	Kevin is a graduate student in NACS program. He joined the Lab in 2006.

	Majid Mirbagheri
	Majid is a graduate student in ECE program. He joined the Lab in 2007.

	Sahar Akram
	Sahar is currently a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Her main interests include investigation over underlying mechanisms of sound streaming in the brain and searching for neural correlates of this phenomena using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) techniques in humans. She joined the lab in September 2009, and is currently pursuing her PhD.

	Michael Locastro
	Michael is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. His current research interest is studying the modulation of plasticity in the ferret auditory cortex during awake, behaving, electrophysiology. He joined the lab in the summer of 2010 and is currently pursuing his Masters.

	Diego Elgueda
	Diego joined the lab in the summer of 2010, when he entered the Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences Program. He is interested in the modulation of neural responses in the auditory system during attentional processes.

	Yanbo Xu
	Yanbo is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research interests include auditory streaming in auditory cortex, computational auditory scene analysis, and speech signal processing. He joined the Lab in Fall 2010 and currently, pursuing his PhD.

	Kayla Kahn