IPR Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD, Linguistics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2019
Contact: josephcylau@northwestern.edu
Joe Lau is a post-doctoral fellow working with IPR developmental psychologist Sandra Waxman in the Infant and Child Development Center.
As a neurolinguist, Lau’s previous research concerned the neurocognitive bases of speech representations and speech processing broadly defined. His research used neurophysiological and behavioral methods in consonance with machine learning techniques to understand long-term and online neuroplasticity in speech encoding in neurotypical populations and individuals with autism. In what is considered theoretical linguistics, Lau’s research explored how traditional theories on formal representations of speech sounds can be supported and enriched by neural evidence.
Most recently, Lau is leading a machine learning project to identify acoustic features in human and non-human vocalizations that support infant cognition. He is also interested in using multivariate pattern analyses to predict infant cognitive development with neurophysiological data.
Lau currently splits his time as a post-doctoral fellow with the Northwestern Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Laboratory, in which position he leads a project aiming to identify combinations of linguistic, cognitive, and neurophysiological phenotypes of autism for the prediction of its diagnosis and risk factors with machine learning.