Postdoctoral fellows are valued as key members of SASS research teams at both the Point Grey campus in Vancouver, BC, and the distributed SLP program site at Vancouver Island Technology Park in Victoria, BC. The School’s faculty believe that educating independent, successful researchers requires providing not only strong guidance, but also enough freedom to explore uncharted territory, and to discover new knowledge.
The School’s research activities are well supported by a variety of competitive private and public sources, including Tri-Council funding. Faculty members’ research findings are disseminated in a wide variety of forms to many different audiences, including academic, professional, and public audiences.
Click on the names below for an insight into the research topics, interests and background of current SASS doctoral students.
B.A. (Calif., L.A., 2018)
M.A. (S.Calif., 2020)
Ph.D. (S.Calif., 2024)
Contact:
Email: helens.lu@ubc.ca
Bio:
Helen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Audiology & Speech Sciences, working in the Language and Development Lab and the Infant Studies Centre (in Psychology) under the guidance of Drs. Alexis Black and Janet Werker. Her postdoctoral work focuses on mono- and multi-lingual infants’ speech segmentation and word learning, supported by a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and a Canada Postdoctoral Research Award (SSHRC). Prior to joining UBC, she completed her PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California, working with Dr. Toby Mintz on the effects of language experience on infants’ and adults’ statistical learning abilities.
Research Interests:
Language acquisition, statistical learning, speech perception, multilingualism
Select Publications:
- Lu, H.S. and Mintz, T.H. (2026). Second language learning facilitates non-adjacent dependency learning: Effects moderated by specific language. Cognitive Science, 50(5), e70221.
- Lu, H.S. and Mintz, T.H. (2026). Task-dependent learning of non-adjacent dependencies: Success in a familiarity rating task versus failure in a two-alternative forced choice task. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 33(1), 12.
- Lu, H.S., Werker, J.F., and Black, A.K. (2025). Statistical word segmentation in unfamiliar speech. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 47).
M.Sc. Bioengineering (EPFL Swiss Inst. of Tech. Lausanne, 2018)
Ph.D. Sensory and Motor Neuroscience (Uni. Göttingen, 2024)
Contact:
Email: Fadhel.elmay@ubc.ca
Website: adcil.audiospeech.ubc.ca
Bio:
Fadhel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Auditory Development and Cochlear Implant Lab (ADCIL), within the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in biomedical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He completed his master’s thesis at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he studied the auditory brainstem and cochlear implantation in mouse models of deafness, before earning a PhD in Sensory and Motor Neuroscience from the University of Göttingen at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences/University Medical Center in Göttingen, Germany.
During his PhD, Fadhel investigated optogenetic cochlear implants, an emerging approach that uses light-sensitive proteins to stimulate auditory neurons more precisely than conventional electrical implants, with the potential to improve speech understanding in noise and music perception.
Now moving from preclinical to human research, he combines electroencephalography (EEG) and auditory behavioral measures with the aim to track auditory adaptation and optimize cochlear implant rehabilitation. As a cochlear implant user himself, Fadhel is also committed to advocating for accessibility and inclusion for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community.
Research Interests:
- Cochlear implants and neuroprosthetics. Cochlear implant fitting, adaptation, and rehabilitation.
- Auditory neuroscience and neural plasticity in cochlear implant users
- EEG measures of auditory processing
- Personalized hearing care using behavioral and predictive measures