From watching brains see, to watching them sleep.

I'm a Senior Research Data Scientist at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. I develop machine learning models that help diagnose sleep problems, fitting them to multi-modal biometric data — high-density EEG, MRI, clinical diagnoses and daily activity records. I also supervise graduate and postgraduate students working with big data across multiple projects.

My research has three threads. The main one is building computational models to understand the neurophysiology of sleep disorders, using big data to find biomarkers that let care be personalised. The second is mathematical techniques for understanding how the brain recognises faces, quantifying face identity and orientation with forward encoding models. The third is how visual and spatial skills contribute to language learning, including reading ability in dyslexia and second language acquisition.

Before Sydney I spent five years as a research scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo, leading a project on the neural basis of face perception with a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, neurobiologists and physicists from five countries. Before that I completed my PhD in psychology at National Taiwan University, where my thesis on visual word form processing won the department's best PhD thesis award.