Ruixi (Lucy) Piao

Ruixi (Lucy) Piao

she/her

Undergraduate student @UMich

About me

I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, pursuing a quadruple major in Computer Science, Data Science, Cognitive Science, and BCN (Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience) with a minor in Business. I’m working on my Honors Thesis in Multisensory Perception Lab, advised by Dr. David Brang.

My research interests focus on understanding 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.

More broadly, I am interested in how the brain dynamically represents speech across multiple levels of processing, from acoustic features and phonemes to words and 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 long-term goal is to pursue a PhD in computational cognitive neuroscience, investigating the neural mechanisms underlying speech and multisensory perception.

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

Presentations

  • 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]. Seventeenth 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]. The 20th Annual Injury Biomechanics Symposium, Columbus, OH, United States.

  • Ma, S., Mao, S., Piao, R., Geng, C., Hua, Y., & Levy, R. (2024, December). A parametric head geometry model accounting for morphological variation in the adult population [Poster presentation]. 2024 Multidisciplinary Design Program Design Expo, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.