Emmy Noether Award for Nicholas A. Lesica

Dr. Nicholas A. Lesica  will establish and head an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group at the LMU, Biozentrum Martinsried,  Germany.

The program of the DFG is named after Emmy Noether, a Jewish mathematician from Erlangen, Germany, who was forced to emigrate to the USA in 1933. This program supports young researchers with international research experience to qualify them for a university teaching career.

Short motivation and description of his research:

Population Coding of natural sounds

The past decades have seen great advances in our understanding of how sounds are represented in the activity of neurons in the brain, and models have been developed that can successfully reproduce the neuronal activity evoked by simple sounds typically used in studies of auditory processing, such as tones. However, when tested with more complex sounds such as human speech, these models often fall short, and recent studies suggest that auditory processing of complex sounds can only be understood by observing the neuronal activity evoked by these sounds directly. In my research, I take advantage of recent advances in experimental technology to observe the activity in populations of neurons during the presentation of natural sounds.

Hopefully, the results of these experiments can be used to develop more advanced models of auditory processing that can reproduce the neuronal activity evoked by complex sounds.

See also News at the LMU:

http://www.uni-muenchen.de/aktuelles/news/forschung/emmy_noether.html