Andrew Oxenham Comments on Psychology's 8th Place on the Worldwide Shanghai Ranking

Andrew Oxenham, faculty, was quoted in the Minnesota Daily on the psychology’s 8th place in the 2024 Shanghai Global Ranking of Academic Subjects. 

Oxenham comments on how there are many different areas of the department encompassing a broad range of research questions, however, there is a lot more interaction and collaboration going on behind the scenes.

Andrew Oxenham and Magdelena Wojtczak Receive a Grant from Uniformed Services University

Congratulations to Andrew Oxenham and Magdalena Wojtczak who have been awarded a $766,307 grant by the Uniformed Services University. 

This grant, in collaboration with researchers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, will fund their project “Auditory consequences and markers of traumatic brain injury,” aiming to collect measures in a civilian population to differentiate blast exposure from traditional noise-induced hearing loss in service members.

Welcome, Baby Jorji Emika Mesik!

The APC lab would like to welcome its newest member, Jorji Emika Mesik, daughter of  Research Assistant Professors Emily Allen and Juraj Mesik.  

Juraj Mesik Receives NIH Supplement

Congratulations to Juraj Mesik, research assistant professor, on receiving an Administrative Assistant Supplement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for $189,577. 

Mesik explains that the supplement will be used for the following:

“Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) due to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a clinical stage of AD that precedes the onset of dementia, making it an opportune stage for both elucidating early consequences of AD on neural function as well as identifying novel neural markers of AD that are reliable and affordable. The present proposal will address both goals by using non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements to characterize how the processing of acoustics and linguistic features of continuous speech is affected in MCI with AD biomarkers and to assess whether these measures can reliably distinguish participants with and without MCI. These results will represent an initial step towards the longer-term goals of developing more reliable measures of neural function in AD that can be used for tracking disease progression and evaluation of the effects of novel clinical interventions.”

Juraj Mesik, PhD, research assistant professor and member of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. 

Congrats Dr. Gao!

In August 2024, Zi Gao successfully defended their PhD thesis, entitled "Perceptual Categorization and Neural Representations of the Human Voice."  Zi is taking up a postdoc position with Shuman He at The Ohio State University.  Best wishes Dr. Gao!