I completed my PhD in Clinical Psychology (Neuropsychology) at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where I was supervised by Brenda Milner. I was then a Wellcome Trust Travelling Research Fellow with Richard Frackowiak at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, London UK, before taking up a position at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK in 2000. I came to Queen's in 2004. My primary research interest is the neural basis of speech understanding. I focus on the processes recruited as utterances (syllables, words and sentences) are transformed from an acoustic signal to meaning, and how these processes are organized in the brain. I also study how people understand speech in challenging listening situations (for example, when there are multiple talkers present, or when speech is masked with noise), and how the processes involved in speech comprehension under such challenging conditions change with age.

Current projects include:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the time course of sentence comprehension.

• Using fMRI to fractionate sentence comprehension into component cognitive processes.

• fMRI of cognitive mechanisms recruited when listening to distorted/degraded or unfamiliar-sounding speech.

• The role of perceptual learning in comprehension of distorted/degraded or unfamiliar-sounding speech.

• Factors that influence attention to one of two simultaneous voices (like at a party), and age-related changes.

• Localization of functional activation using probabilistic maps of cytoarchitectonically defined brain regions.

• Identification of factors that facilitate how well people with cochlear implants relearn to understand speech, using simulations in normally hearing people.

 Area of Specialty