Team

Emma Holmes

Principal Investigator

Emma Holmes is an Associate Professor in Speech and Hearing Science at UCL and leads the Cognitive Hearing Lab. She studied Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and completed her PhD at the University of York with Quentin Summerfield. Emma then moved to Canada to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Institute (University of Western Ontario) with Ingrid Johnsrude. While there, she also collaborated with researchers at the National Centre for Audiology. Next, Emma moved to UCL. Initially, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Tim Griffiths and Karl Friston at the Wellome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. She then joined the Department of Speech Hearing and Phonetic Sciences at UCL as a faculty member in 2021.

email: emma.holmes@ucl.ac.uk

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Harriet Smith

Postdoctoral Fellow

Harriet joined the Cognitive Hearing Lab in 2023 as a post-doctoral research fellow. Prior to joining UCL, Harriet completed her undergraduate degree in in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and her PhD at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (University of Cambridge). Her PhD research focused on speech perception in children with developmental language disorders. Harriet is currently working on a variety of research projects exploring speech comprehension in challenging listening situations. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how listeners learn to recognise and understand familiar voices, which acoustic cues are important for these processes, and how long these effects last. Harriet is also working on a Wellcome-funded project investigating how listeners with and without hearing loss use information about a speaker’s voice, the semantic content of speech, and spatial attention (the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’) to support their speech comprehension, in collaboration with Elin Bonyadi. She uses behavioural methods, pupillometry and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) as tools to explore these questions. For a list of publications, see Harriet’s Google Scholar page.

email: harriet.j.smith@ucl.ac.uk

Elin Bonyadi

PhD student

Elin is a PhD student whose research interests include understanding how central auditory cognition is affected by peripheral hearing loss. Elin’s PhD research aims to understand and compare how people with and without hearing loss use information about semantic context (‘what’), spatial location (‘where’), and talker identity (‘who’) to understand speech in noisy environments, such as among competing speech. In this project, Elin is using behavioural and pupillometry methods. Elin has an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience and BSc in Psychology from University College London. Find out more by visiting Elin’s UCL profiles page.

email: elin.bonyadi.18@ucl.ac.uk

Rebecca Bright

PhD student

Rebecca’s background as a speech and language therapist and in the health tech industry has paved the way to her current PhD focus. Rebecca was awarded an MBE in 2016 for her work in building inclusive innovations and promoting the role of women in science and technology. Rebecca is currently funded by the ERSC UBEL doctoral training program to undertake the development of a novel questionnaire to measure social participation for older people with hearing loss. Her project has implications for potential links between hearing loss, social isolation and cognitive performance. For more information, visit Rebecca’s LinkedIn profile.

email: r.bright.20@ucl.ac.uk

Bindiya Patel

PhD student

Bindiya is a PhD student working on developing auditory training interventions to enhance speech perception in noisy environments for adults with hearing loss. Bindiya is supervised by Dr Emma Holmes and Professor Stuart Rosen, and her PhD is funded by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID). Prior to starting her PhD, Bindiya gained five years of experience working in both adult and paediatric audiology within various NHS sites across England, and most recently worked as a Clinical Educator at the Ear Institute, UCL. Bindiya holds an MSc in Audiological Sciences with Clinical Practice from UCL and a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from Newcastle University. For more information, visit Bindiya’s LinkedIn profile.

email: bindiya.patel@ucl.ac.uk