John van Opstal

John van Opstal is a professor of Neurobiophysics and head of the department of Biophysics at the Radboud University Nijmegen (NL). He was trained in Biophysics and in Spanish, obtained his PhD on the neural control of rapid eye movements, and did his postdoctoral research at the Neurology Department and ETH in Zürich (CH). Since 2005 he is a full professor of Systems Neuroscience in Nijmegen. When he is not running or traveling, he studies sound perception and ~localization behavior of normal-hearing listeners and hearing-impaired patients, as well as the mechanisms of multi-sensory integration (the combined auditory, visual, and vestibular senses in space-time perception). He also investigates the motor strategies of goal-directed eye-head orienting, by using novel psychophysical paradigms, and computational modelling techniques.

"The auditory system and human sound localization behavior" gives a detailed account of his ongoing work and the background of its underlying philosophy. The book delves into the question why humans are such terrific sound localizers. To many it may come as a surprise that the major driving force for our sound-localization abilities is the need to fast and accurately direct our line of sight! The book will appeal to a broad audience of neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, students in neuroscience, and to biophysicists interested in the study and quantitative modelling of sensorimotor integration in the brain.

The book's URL is found at http://www.mbfys.ru.nl/~johnvo/LocalizationBook.html