Congratulations are in order for Andrew King, Professor of Neurophysiology and Director of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, who has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Andrew is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow in DPAG and he is also the Director of the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Training Programme in Neuroscience in Oxford.
The highly prestigious award recognises Andrew's studies on how the brain processes sound and integrates these signals with information provided by our other senses. He discovered that the mammalian brain contains a spatial map of the auditory world and showed that its development is shaped by both auditory and visual experience. His more recent work has demonstrated that the adult brain represents sound features in a remarkably flexible way, continually adjusting to variations in the statistical distribution of sounds associated with different acoustic environments as well to longer term changes in input resulting from hearing loss. In addition to furthering our understanding of the neural basis for auditory perception, his research is providing insight into potential therapeutic opportunities for the hearing impaired.
“I am really thrilled and honoured to have been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, particularly when I think about those Fellows who I have admired – and looked up to – throughout my career", said Andrew. "I have had the privilege of working with some fantastic colleagues and students over the years, and this achievement is as much about them.”
Andrew studied physiology as an undergraduate at King’s College London and carried out a research project on multisensory processing in the superior colliculus for his PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. He joined the University Laboratory of Physiology in Oxford in 1984 as an SERC Postdoctoral Fellow, and was then awarded a Lister Institute Research Fellowship followed by a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship. In 2006, he was appointed to a Wellcome Principal Research Fellowship, the most senior of the Wellcome Trust’s personal awards. He is a recipient of the Wellcome Prize Medal in Physiology and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Physiological Society and Merton College.