Within the center of competence "Language and Medicine" I am especially interested how we can translate insights from cognitive neuroscience into therapeutic approaches for populations with auditory and speech processing deficits.

The aim my current research is to improve the understanding of the neural bases of auditory attention control. Selective attention plays a central role in speech comprehension. It enables us to understand the speech signal of our conversation partner even under challenging conditions (background noise, multiple speakers, echo etc.). Unfortunately, speech comprehension declines significantly in hearing impaired individuals under these conditions, which might be related to ineffective attention control. The goal of this line of research is to identify neural makers of attention in individuals with hearing loss and tinnitus. Subsequently, the relevance of the identified markers is investigated with non-invasive electric brain stimulation and neurofeedback. 

I obtained my PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Bern in 2016. Afterwards, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Donders Institute for Cognitive Neuroimaging and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen before I joined the Neurolinguistcs lab at the University of Zurich in 2019. In autumn 2021, I was awarded the prestigious Ambizione career grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation to start my own research group at the Department of Comparative Language Science.