Associate Member

Carly Anderson is a UCL Senior Research Fellow and a Principal Investigator based at both UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre. She is currently funded by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and hosted by Professor Mairéad MacSweeney in the Visual Communication Research Group. She is a Visiting Researcher on Professor Stefan Schweinberger et al.’s ViCom project.

As a hearing child of congenitally deaf grandparents, and the daughter of a British Sign Language (BSL) Interpreter, BSL became her second language. She conducts her research through a diverse and inclusive lens informed by her experiences and the expert lived experiences of the Deaf community.

During her PhD she examined how the brain adapts after cochlear implantation in deaf adults. Importantly, she studied the neglected role of visual information and how this is combined with auditory information during social communication. Her current research focusses on how the brain coordinates visual information from the face and auditory information from the voice to support language and emotion perception. She is interested in how deafness and different language experiences, including accessing speech via a cochlear implant and bilingualism, can shape these processes. Her research has implications for optimising real-world language outcomes for people who are deaf and use a cochlear implant by taking a multimodal perspective of human communication and the brain.