A sharp sense of space is essential to making the world appear natural, real and joined-up. People with normal hearing can do exceptionally well in experimental tasks that measure the sense of space - someone's "spatial hearing". Yet hearing impairment generally worsens spatial hearing, leaving only an impoverished impression of auditory space. Hearing aids hardly ever help spatial hearing. Worse, they can often add further problems. But despite decades of research the science of spatial hearing is still not solved, especially for complex situations with multiple sounds happening simultaneously or in understanding the effects of impairment or aiding. This programme will help answer these puzzles. There are two overall benefits to listening from having acute spatial hearing. Both take advantage of that fact that in everyday listening sound sources are almost always in distinct physical locations. First, it allows sound sources to be perceived in the locations that they really are. Second, it allows sounds to be separated by virtue of being in different positions. These two together give a sense of realism to the auditory world and help identifying, recognizing or understanding sounds. These reduce the "clutter" of hearing in busy, noisy situations: without any spatial hearing at all, everything would be more likely to be heard together as a jumble. The situation is complicated by there being multiple cues to the direction and distance of a sound source. One is time: the sound from a source to the left will arrive a fraction of a second later at the right ear compared to the left as it has to travel some 50 cm further around the head. Another is intensity: the sound is less powerful as your head casts an acoustic "shadow". Yet despite these multiple cues we generally hear one location for a sound, not many. Further, what we see can affect where we hear a sound -- a famous example of this is the ventriloquist effect. The problem of generating accurate perceptions of auditory space 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. In this programme, 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

Do bacteria care about the seasons? Birds migrate, mammals hibernate, plants flower, insects undergo diapause: in fact, almost all branches of the eukaryotic tree of life have evolved responses that allow them to alter their behavior and physiology in anticipation of the changing seasons. This usually happens through a phenomenon called photoperiodism, in which the length of the day is the environmental factor responsible for triggering these changes. Photoperiodism is a well-studied phenomenon that underlies important events in an organism's life and its interactions with other species. It is also directly affected by climate change, as changes in temperature and other weather variables can render a previously beneficial photoperiodic response maladaptive. Establishing how photoperiodic responses will change under climate change is an imperative, but currently we lack model organisms that allow us to directly test this, as their generally lengthy life cycles have so far precluded attempts at experimentally evolving photoperiodism. During my PhD, I made the timely discovery that bacteria are also capable of photoperiodic responses. Similar to short-day induced hibernation in mammals, when cells of Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 - a remarkable cyanobacterial model organism within the field of circadian rhythms - are exposed to short, winter-like days, they are capable of surviving freezing temperatures 2-3x better than counterparts that are exposed to long, summer-like days. Throughout my PhD, I have physiologically characterized this response and learned that it functions rather similarly to eukaryotic photoperiodism, despite their vast phylogenetic distance. Remarkably, this response is dependent upon the presence of a functional circadian clock, takes multiple generations to be formed, and involves anticipatory changes in lipid membrane saturation. The overarching goal of this proposal is to harness this striking discovery and establish cyanobacteria as the first bacterial model for studying the evolution of photoperiodism. Due to their fast generational time, simple genome and systematically characterized circadian clock, cyanobacteria are a unique model organism that would allow us to not only determine the mechanistic features of photoperiodism, but also would make it possible to perform experimental evolution under various conditions. In this proposal, I intend to make this possible by three separate strategies. First, I will use the vast array of molecular tools available for Synechococcus and establish the genetic basis of cyanobacterial photoperiodism through RNAseq and transposon sequencing, as well as use proteomics to determine other responses beyond cold resistance that may also be photoperiodic. Second, I will test different cyanobacteria and other model bacteria to establish how phylogenetically widespread photoperiodism is amongst prokaryotes, and whether cyanobacteria could also be a model for the study of latitudinal clines. Finally, I will perform experimental evolution on cyanobacteria under climate change conditions based on the latest models proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and establish the evolutionary pathways that cyanobacteria and other organisms might take as they try to adapt to the new environments forced upon them by climate change. Taken together, these aims will fast-forward the study of photoperiodism and its past and future evolution, providing new tools to understand and mitigate the effects of climate change upon photoperiodic responses in general.

The emergence of animal ecosystems during the late Ediacaran (~571-539 million years ago) was a pivotal episode in the evolutionary history of life. However, most of these Ediacaran organisms disappeared immediately before the Cambrian, in what may represent the first mass extinction of complex life. There are thus two key questions that will provide fundamental insights into the origins of modern ecosystems: 1) where do Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life? And, 2) what drove their extinction prior to the onset of the Cambrian? We will address these questions by combining new data collected during fieldwork with computer simulations performed on both individual organisms and whole communities. This project will improve knowledge of the early evolution of complex ecosystems, while at the same time pioneering the development of a rigorous new approach for examining how marine organisms evolved in response to moving fluids. We will work together with local school teachers to produce learning modules focused on 3-D modelling and fluid dynamics, suitable for communicating key evolutionary principals to students (16-18 years old) in the UK and USA.

People use their hearing in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of situations. Our sense of hearing helps us to understand what is going on around us, and warns us of unseen dangers. Possibly more importantly, hearing is vital to social communication. For someone with hearing loss, their experience of hearing disability will depend on the mix of social activities they take part in, and the importance they assign to success in those activities. Very little is known about how such patterns of hearing activity differ from person to person, and between people with normal versus impaired hearing. Nor do we know whether using hearing aids changes the activities people take part in. At a more 'microscopic' level of detail, people instinctively behave in certain ways when faced with challenges to their ability to hear. For example, if we cannot hear what someone is saying because of a noisy background, we typically move closer or turn one ear towards them. We know only a little about these behaviours. People with hearing loss face greater challenges than others, and they may use different behaviours, or maybe they could be trained to use more effective behaviours. Meanwhile, hearing aids are generally designed on the assumption that people remain static and face to face, regardless of the situation. This means not only that hearing aids miss out on the chance to take advantage of their wearer's natural behaviours, but that they sometimes undermine the effectiveness of those behaviours. It is becoming increasingly recognised that in order for hearing aids to be more helpful, they must adapt to the moment-to-moment changes in situation which are part of people's everyday life. Furthermore, the clinical prescribing of hearing aids needs to take more account of each patient's individual lifestyle and activity patterns. Our research will provide new knowledge and insights which can form the basis of future improved hearing aid technology and prescribing. We will do this by: - Constructing a mathematical model describing how the acoustics of the environment, hearing impairment, sound processing in hearing aids and body movements all interact to affect people's hearing performance. To do this, we will carry out several experimental studies measuring how people move and change communication tactics when their hearing is challenged. - Determining whether real-world hearing disability (and the relief from disability provided by hearing aids) is driven by isolated events which are crucial for the individual, or by a 'grand average' of events across time. - Devising and testing hearing-aid fitting protocols which account for patients' insensitivity to acoustic changes. - Developing prototype hearing aid technologies which exploit or support listeners' natural behaviour to provide benefits beyond those currently available, and evaluating them in the laboratory and in realistic conditions. - Examining whether routine clinical data can support more individualised prescription of interventions for hearing loss. We will use a very large set of data accumulated as part of routine clinical care, which means the data are relatively loosely controlled. We will evaluate whether known relations are nevertheless reproduced. If so, we will then look for informative new patterns which might be used to improve the individualisation of treatment for hearing problems.

The emergence of animal ecosystems during the late Ediacaran (~571-539 million years ago) was a pivotal episode in the evolutionary history of life. However, most of these Ediacaran organisms disappeared immediately before the Cambrian, in what may represent the first mass extinction of complex life. There are thus two key questions that will provide fundamental insights into the origins of modern ecosystems: 1) where do Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life? And, 2) what drove their extinction prior to the onset of the Cambrian? We will address these questions by combining new data collected during fieldwork with computer simulations performed on both individual organisms and whole communities. This project will improve knowledge of the early evolution of complex ecosystems, while at the same time pioneering the development of a rigorous new approach for examining how marine organisms evolved in response to moving fluids. We will work together with local school teachers to produce learning modules focused on 3-D modelling and fluid dynamics, suitable for communicating key evolutionary principals to students (16-18 years old) in the UK and USA.