Role
Alex is an early career Research Fellow specialising in fMRI and EEG research. His responsibilities include running the MRI scanner and assisting others with setting up experiments that may want to use fMRI or EEG. He teaches RM1, RM2 and two MSc modules that look at Gorilla and fMRI. He is also in the hearing group and co-supervises a PhD student who is researching musical training with an older population.
Career overview
Alex completed his MSc in Brain Imaging at the University of Nottingham, followed by a PhD in Auditory Neuroscience, also at the University of Nottingham. After this, he worked as a Research Assistant on a linguistics project at NTU, and later spent some time as an acoustics test scientist at a commercial laboratory.
Alex then applied for a role as a specialist EEG technician at NTU, where he assisted staff and students in setting up EEG experiments and also helped implement the Gorilla software for the University. Afterward, he applied for an Early Research Fellow position when NTU upgraded their MRI scanner to include fMRI capabilities. He now works on creating and running fMRI experiments with a focus on the aging population.
Research areas
fMRI – Two current projects that began this year, both investigating aging and its effects on cognitive function.
EEG – Head injury project: investigating whether there are any EEG changes during mild head impacts sustained through sports.
Auditory Science – Investigated auditory brainstem responses and event-related potentials, as well as the effects of noise exposure on these responses.
Publications
de Boer J, Hardy A, Krumbholz K. Could Tailored Chirp Stimuli Benefit Measurement of the Supra-threshold Auditory Brainstem Wave-I Response? J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2022 Dec;23(6):787-802. doi: 10.1007/s10162-022-00848-0. Epub 2022 Aug 19. PMID: 35984541; PMCID: PMC9789297.
Krumbholz K, Hardy AJ, de Boer J. Automated extraction of auditory brainstem response latencies and amplitudes by means of non-linear curve registration. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2020 Nov;196:105595. doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105595. Epub 2020 Jun 10. PMID: 32563894; PMCID: PMC7607223.
Braber, N., Smith, H., Wright, D., Hardy, A., & Robson, J. (2023). Assessing the Specificity and Accuracy of Accent Judgments by Lay Listeners. Language and Speech, 66(2), 267-290. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221101560