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).

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2004

Research Interests: My primary interests are how animals integrate sensory inputs into a coherent representation of the world and how that representation changes to meet changing behavioral demands. The utility of a particular sensory stimulus (and the features of the stimulus that are useful) depends on the behavioral demands facing an animal. It is well-known that attention can modulate the activity of sensory neurons. However, little is known about how the observed modulation actually facilitates behavior. As a post-doc in the NSL, I am studying how the spectrotemporal tuning properties of neurons in auditory cortex are modulated by changes in attention.

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.

Graduate Students

Nima Mesgarani

Nima is a graduate student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His interests include incorporating the knowledge of the auditory systems in audio and speech signal processing. Nima’s primary projects involve content-based audio classification and speech enhancement. He joined the Lab in June 2002 and currently, pursuing his PhD.

Serin Atiani

Serin is a graduate student in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences program. She is interested in the neural representation and processing of sound in auditory cortex. Her research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying signal detection in noise, task related plasticity and auditory categorization in primary and secondary areas of the mammalian auditory cortex. She joined the Lab in January 2004 and currently pursuing her PhD.