About me

I am an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan (B.S. expected May 2027), majoring in Computer Science, Data Science, Cognitive Science, and BCN (Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience). I am working in the Multisensory Perception Lab, advised by Dr. David Brang.

My research investigates how visual speech cues influence auditory speech processing and how audiovisual integration supports speech comprehension. In my current work, I use intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to investigate how visual information shapes the neural encoding of speech and language.

More broadly, I am interested in how the brain dynamically represents speech signals across multiple levels of processing, from acoustic features to sentence-level meaning. I am particularly interested in how the brain integrates acoustic, linguistic, and visual information across time to support predictive and hierarchical language processing.

My name is pronounced RAY-shee Pyao (朴睿熙).

Presentations

• Piao, R., Li, Y., Cao, C., & Brang, D. (2026, March). Neural integration of syntactic and visual temporal information in sentence comprehension [Poster presentation]. 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP), Cambridge, MA, United States.

• Piao, R., Cao, C., Li, Y., Brissenden, J., Jahn, A., & Brang, D. (2025, September). The functional-anatomical organization of spectral and temporal restoration in auditory cortex [Poster presentation]. 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL), Washington, DC, United States.

• Ma, S., Piao, R., Geng, C., Hua, Y., Jones, M., & Hu, J. (2025, May). A statistical human head geometry model considering variations in head skin, skull, and brain among the whole population [Poster presentation]. 20th Annual Injury Biomechanics Symposium, Columbus, OH, United States.