Rate My Professor David McAlpine

Professor David McAlpine is Distinguished Professor of Hearing, Language and the Brain and Academic Director of Macquarie University Hearing in the Department of Linguistics within the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences at Macquarie University. He earned a BSc (Hons I) from the University of Western Australia and a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford. Before joining Macquarie in 2015, he was Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and Director of the UCL Ear Institute at University College London from 2006 to 2015. An Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow since 2016, McAlpine received the prestigious award for his research on spatial hearing mechanisms in the auditory brain. In 2021, he was granted an Einstein Visiting Fellowship to study statistical learning in auditory perception. His research specializes in the neural basis of hearing, encompassing sound localization, interaural time difference coding, neural population coding of sound levels, adaptation to acoustic environments, hidden hearing loss, tinnitus, and cochlear implant optimization.

McAlpine's influential publications include 'Tinnitus with a normal audiogram: physiological evidence for hidden hearing loss and computational model' (Schaette and McAlpine, 2011), 'Mechanisms of sound localization in mammals' (Grothe, Pecka, and McAlpine, 2010), 'Precise inhibition is essential for microsecond interaural time difference coding' (Brand et al., 2002), 'Neural population coding of sound level adapts to stimulus statistics' (Dean, Harper, and McAlpine, 2005), and 'A neural code for low-frequency sound localization in mammals' (McAlpine, Jiang, and Palmer, 2001). These works have garnered thousands of citations and shaped understanding of mammalian auditory processing, with applications to hearing restoration technologies and interventions for neurodiverse conditions. He leads major initiatives such as projects on listening with hearing devices (2025–2030) and using functional near-infrared spectroscopy for cochlear implant outcomes (2022–2026), contributing datasets on auditory cues and cochlear function.