Bio
I spent my childhood and teenage years in an enclosed campus in southern China. I attended physics for my first degree but made a drastic turn after many struggles spending a number of sobering years learning about psychology of human speech perception as a lab assistant in Hong Kong.
I later moved to the UK in search of a path for meaningful contributions. Starting from working with typically listening individuals, I have gradually been trying to learn how speech perception/processing might go wrong or become effortful in clinical individuals. My MSc learnt how speech perception and production are affected by hormones advised by Prof Patricia Cowell. My PhD (with Prof Peter Howell) studied speech listening in noisy environments in people with age-related hearing loss when I developed multimodal brain imaging skills (functional near infrared spectroscopy and EEG) through a grad school cross-disciplinary training fund kindly sponsored by Prof Ilias Tachtsidis to apply on both typical and clinical individuals.
Afterwards I started an NIHR-funded postdoc at Nottingham with Prof Douglas Hartley looking at mother-child neural synchrony ('inter-brain synchrony') in typically listening and cochlear implanted children, and most recently under Dr Holly Robson’s MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship at UCL studying neural speech tracking in people who suffer from aphasia after experiencing a stroke. I am still parts of both teams overseeing neuroimaging analyses in aphasic and cochlear-implanted individuals. I am currently funded by a Wellcome ECA fellowship at Cambridge 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.