Professor Andrew King
MA, MMath, PhD
Andrew King is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Oxford. He heads the Auditory Neuroscience Group in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and is also the Director of the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Programme in Neuroscience at Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College. He received his undergraduate training in physiology at King’s College London and a PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research. He then moved to Oxford, where he has been supported by fellowships from the Science and Engineering Research Council, the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and the Wellcome Trust. He has also been a visiting scientist at the Eye Research Institute in Boston. He is a past winner of the Wellcome Prize in Physiology and, in 2011, was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Andrew’s research employs an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the neural basis of auditory perception and multisensory integration. He is particularly interested in the adaptive processes that take place in the brain to allow accurate hearing to be maintained in different acoustical conditions. This involves studying both short-term changes that help to compensate for the presence of background sounds and the longer-term plasticity induced at higher levels of the auditory system as a result of learning or by hearing loss.