Bio
My childhood and teenage years were spent in an enclosed campus in southern China where I attended undergrad physics. I made a drastic turn after many struggles in physics, spending a number of sobering years wandering about psychoacoustics and neurolinguistics as a junior lab assistant in Hong Kong. Later I moved to the UK for MSc and PhD both in cognitive neuroscience.
Starting from working with typically listening individuals, I have gradually been trying to learn how speech processing might go wrong or become effortful in clinical individuals. My PhD (with Prof Peter Howell) studied speech listening in noisy environments in people with age-related hearing loss. I later worked as an NIHR-funded postdoc with Prof Douglas Hartley studying neural synchrony between the brains of typically listening or cochlear-implanted children and their mothers ('inter-brain synchrony'), and most recently under Dr Holly Robson’s MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship studying neural speech tracking in people who have aphasia after experiencing a stroke. I am still parts of both teams overseeing analyses of neuroimaging data from aphasic and cochlear-implanted individuals, whilst I am now studying neural processing of audiovisual speech in adult cochlear implant users, working with Dr Matt Davis and co-advised by Dr Bob Carlyon and Prof Hartley.
I am a native Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual. I have been a Scottish resident since the pandemic and practice work-life balance by commuting across River Tweed and northeast England.
CV
Education
2020 PhD Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London)
2014 MSc Cognitive Neuroscience (University of Sheffield)
2009 BSc (School of Physics at Sun Yat-Sen University)
Work Experience
2025-2031 Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge)
2023-2025 Research Fellow (Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London)
2020-2024 Research Fellow (NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre, University of Nottingham)
2009-2013 Research Assistant (Department of Electronic Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Publications