John van Opstal, PhD

Position

Department Head Biophysics and Director of the Donders Centre for Neuroscience at the Science Faculty of Radboud University

Role in MOSAICS

Leading professional of MOSAICS beneficiary, supervisor of ESRs 1, 2 and 3

 

Website

Background

  • Auditory systems
  • Plasticity in human sound localisation
  • Biophysics

The main research topics in the Biophysics lab are Human sound-localization and plasticity; Sound processing in the behaving monkey, Multisensory integration, and the Role of monkey Superior Colliculus in saccadic eye-head gaze shifts.  This research has been published in high-rated journals like Science, Nature Neuroscience, J. Neurophysiology, and J. Neuroscience. From 2014-2018 I coordinated a large FP7 IDP Marie-Curie project, HealthPAC, with 14 ESRs working on sensorimotor integration in health and disease at our Institute. Four of these PhD candidates worked on the auditory system. In 2016 I obtained a personal ERC advanced grant (ORIENT), revolving around eye-head coordination in complex audio-visual environments, and within which I have set up an active collaboration with the visual robotics lab of prof Alex Bernardino in Lisbon.

Selected Publications

 

  • L.C.E. Veugen, J. Chalupper, A.F.M. Snik, A.J. Van Opstal, and L.H.M. Mens. Frequency-Dependent Loudness Balancing in Bimodal Cochlear Implant Users. Acta Otolaryngology 2016, 136: 775-781.
  • A.J. van Opstal. The Auditory System and Human Sound Localization Behavior. Elsevier Publishers, Academic Press, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 431 pages, ISBN 978-0-12-801529-2 (2016)
  • G.C. Van Bentum, A.J. Van Opstal, C. C.M.van Aartrijk and M.M Van Wanrooij. Level-weighted response   averaging in elevation to synchronous amplitude-modulated sounds. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017, 142: 3094-3103.
  • B. Zonooz, E. Arani, and A.J. Van Opstal. Learning to localise weakly-informative sound spectra with and without feedback. Scientific Reports (Nature), 2018, 8: 17933.
  • R. Ege, A.J. van Opstal, and M.M. Van Wanrooij. Accuracy-precision trade-off in human sound localisation. Scientific Reports (Nature), 8: 16399, 2018.