BJÖRN HERRMANN
Principal Investigator
Curriculum Vitae
I am interested in how our brains support hearing in younger and older adulthood. We use a wide range of behavioral, physiological, and brain recording tools (including psychophysics, pupillometry, EEG, MEG, fMRI). Before starting my Scientist and Assistant Professor position at the Rotman Research Institute and University of Toronto, I was a postdoc in the CONCH lab at Western University (Canada) and a postdoc in the Auditory Cognition lab at the Max Planck Institute CBS (Germany). I enjoy traveling, hanging out with good people, and playing squash.
TYSEN DREW DAUER
Postdoc
Tysen is a postdoctoral fellow working with Björn Herrmann at the Rotman Research Institute. He is interested in the diversity of human experiences of music and sound. His work combines quantitative and qualitative methods to explore how sensation, perception, and cultural reception interact in auditory experiences and aesthetic judgements across the lifespan. Before moving to Toronto, Tysen studied musicology and psychology at Stanford University. Beyond research, he is currently memorizing book one of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and upping his bread baking skills.
AYSHA MOTALA
Postdoc
I'm a CIHR-funded postdoc at the Brain & Mind Institute (Western Ontario) with Ingrid Johnsrude and co-supervised by Björn. My PhD research focused on how humans process time and how timing information from different senses (vision and audition) are integrated. More recently, I am using neuroimaging methods (fMRI) with spoken, naturalistic narratives to explore how listeners overcome the auditory challenges presented in real-world scenarios. I am also interested in how these abilities change throughout our lifespan. Outside of the lab I can be found traveling, listening to music and enjoying good food.
ERIC CUI
Graduate student
Eric (twitter: @mecui22) is a graduate student in psychology at the Rotman Research Institute and UofT, co-supervised by Björn and Dr. Allison Sekuler. He is interested in the interactions between bottom-up and top-down processing in humans, especially in the aging population, by using both behavioural and neuroimaging methods. He completed his HBSc at the Mississauga campus, where he studied age-related differences in visual perception and listening effort at the human communication lab. In addition to being an active researcher, he enjoys exploring new hiking trails around the GTA.
FRAUKE KRAUS
Graduate student
Frauke received her BSc in Medical Technology from the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart and her MSc in Auditory Technology from the University of Lübeck. During her master thesis in the Auditory Cognition group of Jonas Obleser at the University of Lübeck, she developed a fascination for the field of auditory neuroscience. Frauke is currently working on her PhD (supervised by Jonas and Björn). She is interested how different levels of attentional resource recruitment affect neural oscillations during listening, and the extent to which this oscillatory activity can be used as a marker of listening effort.
MATTHEW T. BAIN
Graduate student
I am a MSc student at Western University in Dr. Ingrid Johnsrude's lab and co-supervised by Björn. I am interested in the neural basis of hearing and hearing loss, neuroimaging methods, and neurotechnology. My research focuses on identifying signatures of effortful listening. For my MSc thesis, we developed a method to assess behavioral executive load during story listening, as a means of assessing listening effort with naturalistic stimuli. I will extend this work during my PhD to investigate neural correlates of listening effort, measured using fMRI and EEG.
Research volunteers
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Naman Sharma