Current Members
Jonas Obleser
Group leader
Jonas studied Psychology with a minor in Statistics and got his degree from the University of Konstanz in 2004. After doing research at University College London and at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, he has held a Chair in Physiological Psychology and Research Methods at the University of Lübeck since 2016.
Currently, his main interests lie in neural dynamics, that is, the moment-to-moment brain states as well as more stable brain traits that characterise our perception and behaviour. An important question for Jonas is whether there are features of neural dynamics that are especially adaptive or protective to our health as we get older. His preferred model system still is the listening human being.
Jonas loves typography, which can be a pain when you design figures or manuscripts with him.
Google Scholar • PubMed • jonasobleser.com • ResearcherID
Mohsen Alavash
Postdoctoral researcher
Mohsen’s background is in biomedical engineering. He received his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Oldenburg in 2015. During his PhD he investigated how brain networks enable us to resolve cognitive challenges, and why it occasionally fails to do so reflecting its capacity limits. To follow-up this question as a postdoc, he has been studying the relation between brain networks and behavior in challenging listening tasks at the Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig and currently at the University of Lübeck. To this end, he adopts graph-theoretical network analysis of the human functional connectome built upon the brain hemodynamic responses or neuronal oscillations.
He loves extracting knowledge from complex data, and is good at making typos.
Julia Erb
Postdoctoral researcher
Julia studied Biomedicine and Neuroscience at the Universities of Würzburg, Paris and Oxford, and completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute Leipzig in 2014. After a postdoc at Maastricht University, she continued her postdoctoral research at the University of Lübeck in 2017.
Her main interests lie in auditory processing in human and non-human primates: How are complex natural sounds, such as speech and animal vocalizations, recognized and analyzed in the auditory system to create a coherent percept? Her current research examines how cortical representations of acoustic features change as we get older. To this end, she combines computational modelling, (functional) MRI, and psychoacoustics.
Jens Kreitewolf
Postdoctoral researcher
Jens received his MSc in Psychology from Ruhr University Bochum in 2009. His sustained interest in the auditory system was initiated during this time, when Jens studied the electrophysiological correlates of attention to moving sounds. During his Leipzig years at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (2009−2016), Jens conducted research on the sensory aspects of auditory speech and voice processing using psychophysics and fMRI. In 2016, he was awarded an ACN Erasmus Mundus stipend to work at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research in Montreal. Jens brought back from Canada a refreshed interest in spatial hearing and a deep love for poutine. His current research aims at improving our understanding of how the auditory system accomplishes robust comprehension of speech from different talkers.
Sebastian Puschmann
Postdoctoral researcher
Sebastian is a physicist by training. He received a doctorate degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Oldenburg in 2013 and further deepened his knowledge of brain function as a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all and the Montreal Neurological Institute, before joining the Auditory Cognition lab in September 2019.
Sebastian investigates how the auditory system extracts and represents behaviorally relevant sensory information. His current work deals with the question how individual differences in sensory experience or training – for example, related to hearing impairment or musical training – impact on the neural processing of speech in background noise. Sebastian likes to explore new neurocognitive methods and data analysis strategies. In recent years, he developed a particular passion for naturalistic experimental designs, allowing him to study auditory processing in ecologically relevant listening settings.
Franziska Scharata
Lab manager
Lea-Maria Schmitt
PhD student
Lea obtained a BA in German Philology and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Vienna. After completing her MSc in Psychology at the University of Lübeck, she started her PhD at the intersection of Neuroscience and Linguistics in the Obleser lab. In her research, she asks how the brain exploits semantic context to predict upcoming speech when comprehension is challenged by poor acoustics. A major focus of her work is on the neural network dynamics underlying the integration of multiple contextual timescales during naturalistic listening.
Lea loves welding, drilling and grinding, which comes in (partly) handy when new lab equipment is needed.
Sarah Tune
Postdoctoral researcher
Sarah received a B.A. degree in Language and Communication studies as well as a PhD in Neurolinguistics from the University of Marburg, Germany, where she worked on the neurophysiological signatures and the neural networks that support language comprehension.
She then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine before joining the Auditory Cognition research group in 2016.
Her main research interests follow the question of how the human brain achieves the remarkable feat of processing and comprehending language under at times extremely challenging conditions and in the face of age-related neural, cognitive and sensory decline. Sarah is particularly interested in understanding how different neural and cognitive strategies work together to enable successful listening. Most of the time you will find her deeply immersed in building ever more complex models predicting human speech comprehension.
Leonhard Waschke
PhD student
Leo studied psychology and neuroscience in Leipzig and Berlin. While in Leipzig his interest in cognitive neuroscience in general and the auditory system in particular got fuelled by his work as an undergraduate assistant in the Obleser lab, back then based at the MPI CBS. After graduating from the SCAN master program at FU Berlin he re-joined the lab in 2016 to pursue his PhD in Lübeck.
He is interested in the effect of spontaneously fluctuating brain states on the processing of auditory information, perception and ultimately behaviour. He fancies and tries to develop new methods that could help to identify behaviourally relevant brain states by inferring neuronal processes from non-invasive recordings. He mostly uses electrophysiology of both human and non-human animals.
Leo enjoys good data visualization as well as all things aesthetically pleasing.
Malte Wöstmann
Postdoctoral researcher
Malte studied Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and finished his Master’s degree in 2012. Form 2012 to 2015, he did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig in the research group ‘Auditory Cognition’, under supervision of Jonas Obleser. Since 2015, Malte is working as a Post-doc in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lübeck.
His research focuses on the electrophysiological dynamics of human auditory attention. Malte is currently mainly interested in how the neural system accomplishes the suppression of distracting information in order to focus attention on relevant stimuli.
Malte loves simplicity, having concise hypotheses, and neat experimental designs.
Alumni
Alex Brandmeyer — Postdoctoral researcher
Google Scholar PubMed alexbrandmeyer.com
Felix Deilmann — Research Scientist
Lorenz Fiedler — PhD student
PubMed
Molly Henry — Postdoctoral researcher
Google Scholar PubMed molly-henry.com
Sophie Herbst — Postdoctoral researcher
PubMed Cognition & Brain Dynamics
Björn Hermann — Postdoctoral researcher
PubMed bjoernherrmann.com
Sung-Joo Lim — Postdoctoral researcher
PubMed
Michael Plöchl — Postdoctoral researcher
PubMed
Mathias Scharinger — Postdoctoral researcher
PubMed inter-word.net
Antje Strauß — PhD student
PubMed
Anna Wilsch — PhD student
PubMed
Research Assistants
Frauke Kraus
Svenja Meyn
Clara Mergner
Malte Naujokat
Elisabeth Ni
Anna Ruhe
Sarah Sentis