Graham Flick, PhD
About Me
I'm a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, where I work with Drs. Rosanna Olsen, Jennifer Ryan, and Jed Meltzer.
My research characterizes the brain systems that support visual perception, language, and memory. This focuses on, for example, how brain activity elicited by individual eye movements helps to encode new memories, and how variations in the quality or nature of this encoding may impact the recall and description of those memories later in time. To do this, my work emphasizes naturalistic or ecologically valid experimental paradigms - such as viewing movies or reading stories - and combines electrophysiological recordings (M/EEG), imaging (MRI), and eye-tracking, to study rapid cognitive processes as they unfold. Ongoing projects examine how brain oscillations couple with the timing of eye movements to support memory encoding, and how brain responses to naturalistic materials (e.g., audiovisual films), measured with M/EEG, may predict memory and cognitive decline in older adults.
I received my PhD in Cognition & Perception from New York University in 2023. During my graduate training, my research focused on word recognition and semantic processing in visual reading, using a combination of MEG, eye-tracking, and MRI. In particular, I used simultaneous MEG recordings and eye-tracking to study visual word recognition in natural reading with eye movements; a technique that I have since continued to use in new studies of oscillatory mechanisms in visual memory. Prior to graduate school, I earned my Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Dalhousie University, and spent three years as a Lab Manager in the MEG Lab of New York University Abu Dhabi. I also completed a PhD internship at IBM Research in 2022, where I examined speech indicators of cognitive decline in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease.
Contact: gflick @ research [dot] baycrest [dot] org