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Dr. Steffen A. Herff

DECRA Research Fellow, Western Sydney University

Steffen graduated in Psychology at the Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf in Germany before going on to complete his PhD at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development focusing on 'Memory for Melody' in 2017.

After his PhD, Steffen secured a DAAD-UA grant to conduct the "Noisy Ear" project in Germany, exploring context effects of background noise on memory before accepting a position at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, where he worked on Statistical Learning and Memory in the auditory domain.

In 2019, Steffen joined the Digital Cognitive Musicology Lab at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, on the ERC grant “Principles of Musical Structure Building: Theory, Computation, and Cognition” to lead the empirical efforts of the project. Shortly after, he secured the SPARK grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation to lead a separate research stream on music-induced imagination.

In 2021, Steffen won a three-year ARC DECRA to further research imagination, music, and how they interact.
His current research is situated at the intersection between Memory, Music, Imagination, Information Sampling, and Neuroscience. The projects range from fundamental memory, learning, and perception research as well as modelling of information sampling in ageing and mood disorders, over social negotiation between musical co-performers, the creation of new compositional tools, and empirically investigating how musical features affect imagination, to non-invasive (e.g., EEG, MEG) and invasive brain imaging (e.g., ECoG) in musical rhythm perception as well as brain stimulation to modulate memory encoding.

Experience

  • 2022–present
    DECRA Research Fellow, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia
  • 2019–2022
    Postdoctoral fellow, Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
  • 2017–2019
    Research scientist, Institute of High-Performance Computing, Social & Cognitive Computing, Music Cognition Group, A*STAR, Singapore
  • 2011–2014
    Research assistant, Human Learning Group, Department for Cognitive and Industrial Psychology, Institute for Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University, Germany
  • 2013–2013
    Honorary Academic Appointment, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University, Australia

Education

  • 2017 
    Western Sydney University, Sydney, PhD, Memory and Music Perception
  • 2013 
    Heinrich-Heine Universität, Düsseldorf, Bachelor of Science, Psychology