PhD Candidate in Auditory Computational Neuroscience

Humans and animals can successfully detect sounds and react to vocalisations in the middle of busy acoustic environments, e.g. a busy street or a party. Current algorithms are not yet achieving the same level of performance. The brain is thought to use expectations and predictions to overcome this challenge. What are the underlying mechanisms and circuits that enable this performance? Can we translate these algorithms to technical applications, such as hearing aids or speech recognition in smart phones?

In this PhD project you will address these questions on a fundamental level, recording many neurons simultaneously from the auditory cortex of mice while they perceive and react to sounds. You will be using a cutting-edge two-photon microscope for this purpose, which allows recording from up to 1000s of neurons in each mouse. Next, you will analyse the resulting data to discover the mechanisms that integrate expectations/predictions with current acoustic information and in this way improve the signal-to-noise ratio, against a background sound. A central step in this analysis will be to refine our processing pipeline to allow for more complex and sophisticated experiments. For this purpose, and to guarantee a swift start, you will work closely with a second PhD candidate who has already acquired expertise in all practical aspects of the project. The results of this PhD project have the potential to generalise to other domains of neuroscience and generalise to a new theory of predictive coding, based on the actual underlying neural circuits and computations. You will have a teaching load of up to 10%.