School of Medicine
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Michael Akeroyd

Professor of Hearing Sciences, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences

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Biography

I am Professor of Hearing Sciences at the University of Nottingham. I did my PhD at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, then postdocs at MRC IHR Nottingham, University of Connecticut Health Centre, and the University of Sussex before joining the Scottish Section of MRC /CSO Institute of Hearing Research, Glasgow in 2002 as a Programme Leader Track. I became the Section Director in Glasgow in 2008 then overall Director of MRC IHR from 2015 to its closure in 2018. I am presently Academic Head of Hearing Sciences at UoN and Deputy Director of Research for the School of Medicine.

My research concentrates on on topics of spatial hearing, auditory impairment and disability, hearing aids, and quality of life using psychophysics, speech and questionnaires. I currently hold MRC and EPSRC funding.

I was awarded the 2013 Thomas Simm Littler Prize of the British Society of Audiology, am a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and past President of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology. In 2021 I was an Output Assessor for Unit-of-Assessment #3 of the UK "REF".

Expertise Summary

Auditory perception; spatial hearing; auditory impairment and disability; hearing aids; hearing-related quality of life ;psychophysics; psychoacoustics; speech perception; questionnaires

Research Summary

About one in six UK adults has an auditory disability, rising to one in two over 75. IHR is as an interdisciplinary research institute, conducting experimental research on hearing impairment in… read more

Recent Publications

Current Research

About one in six UK adults has an auditory disability, rising to one in two over 75. IHR is as an interdisciplinary research institute, conducting experimental research on hearing impairment in adults and children underpinned by basic science into the brain mechanisms of hearing. We conduct auditory science of the highest quality, continually championing the most exciting, innovative research, hoping to discover new phenomena and to further their explanations, while also developing innovative new methods and interventions. The questions motivating IHR's scientific research are the scientific "Grand Challenges" in hearing: to solve, for adults and children with (or without) hearing losses the questions of "What do they hear of the world?", "What do they miss?", "What can be done about it?", and, underpinning all these, "How do we hear?".

My programme is concerned with the problem of generating accurate perceptions of auditory space. This is , overall, akin to solving a three-dimensional jigsaw of multiple overlapping sounds, time delays, and power differences. Somehow our perceptual systems seamlessly and apparently effortlessly solves the puzzle of putting all the pieces together properly. We will use cutting-edge auditory experiments to answer two key questions. First, how does the auditory system join the multiple cues to location in complex, dynamic, multi-sound, audio-visual listening situations? Second, how does hearing impairment and aided listening affect this? We expect that the insights gained in this programme will help us to understand better how spatial hearing works in real, everyday listening, and will help inform how future hearing aids might be designed to improve spatial hearing

School of Medicine

University of Nottingham
Medical School
Nottingham, NG7 2UH

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