Chris Heffner

PhD, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park
Assistant Professor, Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo

I'm currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences at the University at Buffalo. I study speech perception: how we understand the sounds other people make when they talk. I'm 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 can wear many hats: cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist, linguist, and speech scientist. I am 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.

For reference, there's a picture of me below. Usually I'm wearing glasses!


© 2010-2023 Chris Heffner; Updated 2023-01-26