University College London
Emma Holmes is an Associate Professor in Speech and Hearing Science at UCL and leads the Cognitive Hearing Lab. Her research focuses on the perception of speech and other sounds, and how these processes are affected by hearing loss.
Emma obtained her PhD at the University of York and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario. She then moved to UCL, joining the Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences at UCL as a faculty member in 2021.
Developing an auditory training tool to improve speech understanding in noisy places
Read about Emma’s research projectEmma’s approaches to hearing research
I originally got interested in hearing through music; I learned the piano as a child and became interested in why we perceive sounds the way we do. Attention has also been an area that’s always fascinated me – the idea that our experience is so strongly determined by the sounds we choose to listen to.
During my PhD, I had the chance to meet lots of children who used hearing aids, and I learned that hearing aids were not well equipped to deal with background noise. This motivated me to conduct research that could help to develop future technologies for improving hearing in everyday noisy environments.
I want to make a real difference to people’s lives. In the future, it would be amazing to be able to point to something and say that it’s helping people to hear better and my research contributed to it. That’s my ultimate goal.
Ultimately, I hope my research will help us better understand the underlying causes of difficulty with hearing for people with hearing loss and lead to better treatments. I can imagine a hearing aid of the future that can take into account a person’s individual strategies for listening in noisy environments. Such a hearing aid would capitalise on aspects of listening that they’re already very good at and support aspects of listening that they struggle with.