Welcome

I am a graduate student at MIT in the Lab for Computational Audition working with Josh McDermott. I am also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and was previously the Henry E. Singleton (1940) Presidential Fellow. I am also affiliated with the Center for Brains Minds and Machines.

Research Interests

Broadly speaking I am interested in understanding human perception by building models that can accurately predict human behavior in a wide variety of situations. I also work on leveraging these models to improve human perception.

More specifically much of my work is in sound localization, where people are able to accurately locate sound-producing objects in their day-to-day environment just by listening. While this may seem second nature to us, it turns out to be a complex problem where we lack a full understanding of the computational mechanisms that underlie this remarkable ability in humans.

Recent Work

Francl & McDermott. (in press), Deep neural network models of sound localization reveal how perception is adapted to real-world environments. Nature Human Behavior.

Saddler, M. R., Francl, A., Feather, J., Qian, K., Zhang, Y., & McDermott, J. H. (2021). Speech Denoising with Auditory Models. Proc. Interspeech 2021, 2681-2685.