Chris Heffner
PhD, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park
Former Assistant Professor, Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo
Until January 2025, I was an assistant professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at the University at Buffalo. I studied speech perception: how we understand the sounds other people make when they talk. I was particularly interested in categorization (how we tell which sounds are the same and which are different) and adaptation (coping with listening situations that we're not used to, like fast speech or accented speech), with a focus on learning and change in those processes. This means I worse many hats: neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, and speech scientist. I was also a research associate at the Buffalo Museum of Science, which means that I'm a total nerd who gets to talk about science to the public.
In January 2025, I moved to industry as a medical science liaison for Teva Pharmaceuticals. I am keeping this website for archival purposes but do not plan to update it. UB has been kind enough to allow me to keep an affiliation so that I can publish my academic work.
For reference, there's a picture of me below. Usually I'm wearing glasses!
© 2010-2025 Chris Heffner; Updated 2025-03-09