Martin Vestergaard

Dr Martin Vestergaard

MSc PhD MA

Martin is a computational neuroscientist interested in the psychology of decision-making, mental health & communication.

Martin Vestergaard

Martin received his PhD in Psychological Acoustics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) where he had previously earned his MSc and EE degrees following undergraduate and graduate studies in Electrical Engineering and Communications at DTU and Polytech Nantes. He was a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, Cambridge before he moved on to study cognitive aspect of the reward system in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. He became a Fellow and Tutor in Wolfson College in 2011, and he has previously held the role of Deputy Senior Tutor.

Martin's research interests include behavioural and neural aspects of economic decision-making, cognitive aspects of auditory perception, and the evolutionary bases of perceptual and cognitive processes. He uses psychophysical and neuroimaging methods to identify behavioural and neural indices of reward processing and auditory function.

A key finding in his early work was that humans and other animals may have evolved an ability to gauge the skeletal size of suitors and predators from vocal communication signals in order to judge their potential competence and/or danger. Recently, he has been working on the evolutionary basis of developmental dyslexia and brain mechanisms underlying suboptimal economic decision-making.

His research has been featured in BBC,  The Telegraph, CNN, Forbes, and Wired.com