Profile

I do brain imaging to see how big certain parts of the brain are, where they are connected to, and which parts of are working when a person does certain things. I want to understand how, for example, a drug changes how the brain works. At the moment, I am working on how deaf people grow up with different brains to hearing people. I want to be able to use those differences to understand more about the treatments we use for deafness, such as cochlear implants.

I don’t really have a typical day. I spend time meeting people, sometimes deaf people, sometimes I need to use a British Sign Language interpreter to speak to them. Then I will ask them to lie down in the MRI scanner so that I can take pictures of their brain. Then I look through the data and use computers and maths to understand what is going on in their brain. Some days I work with computers all day to look at pictures of brains. When I have a large enough amount of pictures then I can compare across different people and if I find something interesting then I will write a report about it and send it to other scientists.