I am interested in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying speech perception in individuals who have older brains, a damage in the ear, or suffer from cognitive impairment such as Alzheimer's disease. Using a variety of neuroimaging techniques (e.g. EEG, MRI), I analyze how different rehabilitation strategies for age-related hearing loss, such as novel hearing aid technology or lip reading training, change the structure and the functioning of the brain. Furthermore, I am investigating the association between sensory impairment and cognitive decline in older adults. My long-term goal is to evaluate and develop rehabilitation strategies for age-related sensory impairments to maintain sensory and cognitive functioning in healthy older adults as well as in older adults who suffer from MCI and dementia to improve their quality of life in the long-term.
I have completed a PhD in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). After, as part of Team 17 of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA), I worked as a postdoc at Concordia University in Montréal (Canada). Since November 2019, I continued my postdoc at the University of Zurich in the Phonetics & Speech Sciences group at the Department of Computational Linguistics, funded by the Postdoc Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich. I was furthermore able to secure a PRIMA grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to build up my own research group at the University of Zurich starting in summer 2020.