Alan Archer-Boyd, Ph.D.
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Institute of Communication Acoustics
Room: ID/2/319
Universitätsstr. 150
D-44780 Bochum
Tel.: +49 234 32 28984
Email: alan.archer-boyd@rub.de
http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ika/mitarbeiter/boyd.html
CV
Alan originally hails from the wet and hilly West of Scotland. He received a B.Sc in Physics with Meteorology from the University of Edinburgh in 2008. In 2009 he completed an M.Sc in Acoustics and Music Technology from the same university, with a dissertation entitled, “A Comparative Study of Sound-Reinforcement Systems and Measurement Techniques in Auditoria.”
After working as an acoustic consultant in England, he returned to Scotland to work as a research assistant at the Medical Research Council’s Institute of Hearing Research (IHR) in Glasgow, before starting a biomedical engineering PhD with the IHR and the University of Strathclyde in 2010.
The thesis, entitled “Experimental investigations of auditory externalization and the application of head-movement information to hearing-aid signal processing,” was completed in December 2013.
Until April 2015 Alan was a postdoc researcher with the ICanHear project at the Institute of Communication Acoustics (IKA) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, investigating the use of head movement in hearing-aid signal processing. In May 2015 Alan joined the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, as a postdoc, researching a new psychophysical test for evaluating cochlear implant processing strategies.
In addition to research, Alan is a keen advocate for improving the public understanding of science. He helped found a science podcast in 2008 (www.eusci.org.uk) and a science magazine in 2010 (www.the-gist.org). He currently writes articles for European Commission’s Horizon Magazine (www.horizon-magazine.eu).
Research
Listener and talker head movements; internalization and externalization of sound by hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners; multimodal listening devices; cochlear implants
Publications
Boyd AW, Whitmer WM, Soraghan, JJ, Akeroyd MA (2012). Auditory externalization in hearing-impaired listeners: The effect of pinna cues and number of talkers. J. Acous. Soc. Am., 131, 268-274
Brimijoin WO, Boyd AW, Akeroyd MA (2013). The contribution of head movement to the externalization and internalization of sounds. PLoS One 8(12), e83068
Boyd AW, Whitmer WM, Brimijoin WO, Akeroyd MA (2013) Improved estimation of direction of arrival of sound sources for hearing aids using gyroscopic information. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) 19, 030046
