Edmund C Lalor, PhD

Assistant Professor, School of Engineering, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience Contact Information Printing House, Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2 Phone: +353-1-8961743 Email: edlalor@tcd.ie Web: http://www.mee.tcd.ie/neuraleng/People/Ed

News

• 30/03/12 Paper on the cocktail party problem published in EJN.
• 23/01/12 MND - the Inside Track. RTE 1 21:35.
• 01/11/11 Michael Crosse joins the Lalor lab as a PhD student.
• 01/10/11 James O'Sullivan joins the Lalor lab as a PhD student.
• 12/09/11 Gerard Loughnane joins the Lalor lab as a PhD student.
• 01/06/11 Our most recent paper is the 'Feature Article' in June's Cerebral Cortex.
• 23/03/11 Alan Power successfully defends his PhD thesis!
• 14/03/11 Alan Power to defend his PhD thesis on the 23rd of March.
• 04/02/11 IRCSET deadline approaching (16th Feb) - interested students encouraged to make contact ASAP. Possible projects.
• 01/02/11 Lalor Lab opens for business!

Bio

Ed Lalor received the B.E. degree in electronic engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland in 1998 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1999.

After periods working as a silicon design engineer for a Dublin-based company and a primary school teacher for children with learning difficulties, Ed joined MIT's Media Lab Europe, where he worked from 2002-2005 as a research scientist investigating brain-computer interfacing and attentional mechanisms in the brain. This research led to a PhD in biomedical engineering which was completed through UCD in 2006. Subsequently, he spent 2 years in New York working as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and as an adjunct assistant professor in the City College of New York. He returned to a position as an IRCSET Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Institute of Neuroscience and the Centre for Bioengineering in Trinity College Dublin in 2008. Following a brief stint at University College London's Institute of Ophthalmology, he returned to Trinity College Dublin as an Ussher Lecturer in 2011.

My CV/Resume

Research Interests

• Processing of electrophysiological signals reflecting activity of human sensory systems.
• Multisensory integration.
• Effects of selective attention on sensory and perceptual processing.
• Computational modelling of the visual system at various hierarchical levels.
• The encoding and decoding of sensory information in populations of neurons.
• Sensory deficits in schizophrenia and autism.
• Brain-computer interfacing.

Collaborators

• Professor John J. Foxe - Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.
• Professor Barak A. Pearlmutter - Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
• Professor Liam Paninski - Columbia University, New York.
• Dr. Simon P. Kelly - City College of New York, New York.
• Dr. Hans-Peter Frey - Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
• Dr. Paul Dockree - Trinity College Dublin.
• Professor Ian Robertson - Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience.
• Professor Matteo Carandini - University College London.
• Dr. Redmond O'Connell - Trinity College Dublin

Selected Publications

Book Chapters

• Lalor EC, Pearlmutter BA, Foxe JJ (2009). Reverse correlation and the VESPA method. In: Handy, T. C. (Ed.), Brain Signal Analysis: Advances in Neuroelectric and Neuromagnetic Methods, MIT press.

Journals

• Murphy JW, Kelly SP, Foxe JJ, Lalor EC (2012). Isolating early cortical generators of visual evoked activity: A systems identification approach. Experimental Brain Research, in press.
• Whelan R, Conrod PJ, Poline JB, Lourdusamy A, Banaschewski T, Barker GJ, Bellgrove MA, Büchel C, Byrne M, Cummins TDR, Fauth-Bühler M, Flor H, Gallinat J, Heinz A, Ittermann B, Mann K, Martinot JL, Lalor EC, Lathrop M, Loth E, Nees F, Paus T, Rietschel M, Smolka MN, Spanagel R, Stephens DN, Struve M, Thyreau B, Vollstaedt-Klein S, Robbins TW, Schumann G, Garavan H, and the IMAGEN consortium (2012). Adolescent impulsivity phenotypes characterized by distinct brain networks. Nature Neuroscience, doi:10.1038/nn.3092.
• Kelly SP, Schroeder CE, Lalor EC (2012). What does polarity inversion of extrastriate activity tell us about striate contributions to the early VEP? A comment on Ales et al (2010). NeuroImage, doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.03.081.
• Power AJ, Foxe JJ, Forde EJ, Reilly RB, Lalor EC (2012). At what time is the cocktail party? A late locus of selective attention to natural speech. European Journal of Neuroscience, 35(9): 1497-1503.
• Power AJ, Lalor EC, Reilly RB (2011). Endogenous auditory spatial attention modulates obligatory sensory activity in auditory cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 21(6):1223-1230.
• Frey HP, Kelly SP, Lalor EC, Foxe JJ (2010). Early spatial attentional modulation of inputs to the fovea. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(13): 4547-4551.
• Lalor EC, Foxe JJ (2010). Reply: On interpreting responses to low contrast stimuli in terms of magnocellular activity - a few remarks. Vision Research, 50(2010): 991-994. pdf
• Lalor EC, Foxe JJ (2010). Neural responses to uninterrupted natural speech can be extracted with precise temporal resolution. European Journal of Neuroscience, 31(1):189-193. pdf
• Lalor EC, Ahmadian Y, Paninski L (2009). The relationship between optimal and biologically plausible decoding of stimulus velocity in the retina. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 26(11):B25-B42. pdf
• Lalor EC, Power AP, Reilly RB, Foxe JJ (2009). Resolving precise temporal processing properties of the auditory system using continuous stimuli. Journal of Neurophysiology, 102(1):349-359. pdf
• Lalor EC, Foxe JJ (2009). Visual evoked spread spectrum analysis (VESPA) responses to stimuli biased towards magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. Vision Research, 49 (2009):127-133.
• Lalor EC, Yeap S, Reilly RB, Pearlmutter BA, Foxe JJ (2008). Dissecting the cellular contributions to early visual sensory processing deficits in schizophrenia using the VESPA evoked response. Schizophrenia Research, 98(2008): 256-264. pdf
• Lalor EC, Kelly SP, Pearlmutter BA, Reilly RB, Foxe JJ (2007). Isolating endogenous visuo-spatial attentional effects using the novel Visual Evoked Spread Spectrum Analysis (VESPA) technique. European Journal of Neuroscience, 26(12):3536-3542. pdf
• Lalor EC, Pearlmutter BA, Reilly RB, McDarby G, Foxe JJ (2006). The VESPA: a method for the rapid estimation of a visual evoked potential. NeuroImage, 32, 1549-1561. pdf
• Kelly SP, Lalor EC, Reilly RB, Foxe JJ (2006). Increases in alpha oscillatory power reflect an active retinotopic mechanism for distracter suppression during sustained visuospatial attention. Journal of Neurophysiology 95(6):3844-51.
• Lalor EC, Kelly SP, Finucane C, Burke R, Smith R, Reilly RB, McDarby G (2005). Steady-state VEP-based brain-computer interface control in an immersive 3d gaming environment. EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, 2005(19):3156-3164.
• Kelly SP, Lalor EC, Reilly RB, Foxe JJ (2005). Visual spatial attention tracking using high-density SSVEP data for independent brain-computer communication. IEEE Trans. Neu. Syst. & Rehab. Eng., 13(2):172-178.
• Kelly SP, Lalor E, Finucane C, McDarby G, Reilly RB (2005). Visual spatial attention control in an independent brain-computer interface. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., 52(9):1588-1596.