I am currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Huron University College at Western University. My research focuses on fundamental questions in the domain of learning and memory on the one hand, and in the domain of pattern understanding on the other. The way in which I integrate these two areas of research is through the study of perceptual expertise – specifically, how it develops and is how it is maintained. In order to gain traction on the question of how one becomes an expert in a given domain, much of my research has focused on music and speech as model systems, in part because there is such experiential variability in these domains.The articles I have published in this area have touched on the following research questions:1. Through what cognitive and neural mechanisms do we recognize and understand patterns in our environments?2. How do we balance stability and flexibility in learning new perceptual representations?3. How do environmental and cognitive factors shape the learning and maintenance of auditory skills?4. What do we implicitly learn from our auditory environments, and does this kind of learning relate to explicit skill acquisition?