N. Jeremy Hill, D. Phil.

Jeremy Hill obtained his doctorate (called a D.Phil. rather than a Ph.D., according to Oxford's tradition) in 2002 for his thesis entitled Testing Hypotheses about Psychometric Functions. The software he developed for this thesis has been widely used by psychophysics researchers around the world, with Google reporting over 1400 citations of the two 2001 papers that introduced it, co-authored with Felix Wichmann.

He moved to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biological Cybernetics as a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf's Empirical Inference department (now part of the MPI for Intelligent Systems). Here he began to focus on brain-computer interface research (BCI) which he found to be the ideal intersection of his experience in neuroscience and statistics with the department's focus on machine-learning. He became a senior research scientist leading the small BCI group at the MPI, and was privileged to work in close collaboration with Prof. Niels Birbaumer and colleagues at the University of Tübingen. This work involved a combination of theoretical and analytical work to develop algorithms for EEG and ECoG signal processing, and fieldwork at paralysed patients' bedsides and in the OR to apply BCI technology practically. It also led to the development of the first BCI system driven by auditory stimuli, launching a small but industrious neurotechnology sub-field which he still pursues enthusiastically today.

Dr. Hill served as project coordinator for the BCI2000 project, and has taught at many of the BCI2000 workshops, and is the principal developer and maintainer of BCPy2000, a Python-based system for rapid development of new experiments, signal-processing algorithms and applications on the BCI2000 platform.

Work History