Ranil Sonnadara

Overview

Ranil Sonnadara is the Special Advisor to the Vice-President (Research), the Director of Education Science and an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at McMaster University. In his role as Special Advisor to the Vice-President (Research), he provides guidance and leadership on strategic priorities and institutional policies related to research and advanced computing. His immense research interests include sound design, behavioural neuroscience, creating auditory and multisensory experiences for audiences, and improving training methods for health professionals, musicians and athletes. The Sonnadara Lab studies how we learn new skills and evaluate performance, with a specific interest in how experiences help shape our sensory and motor systems. Ranil’s interest in aging research focuses on age-related hearing decline, improving assistive devices for the hearing impaired, specifically in older adults, smart prosthetics for older adult amputees, age-related cortical plasticity, and language-based predictors of cognitive decline.

Affiliations

• Associate Professor; Director, Education Science
• Associate Professor (Part-Time), Surgery, Faculty of Health Sciences
• Associate Member, Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
• Member, McMaster Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities
• Associate Member, Linguistics and Languages, Faculty of Humanities
• Associate Member, School of the Arts, Faculty of Humanities
• Member, McMaster Institute for Music & the Mind, Faculty of Science
• Associate Member, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, Faculty of Science
• Special Advisor to the VP Research, McMaster University,
• Associate Professor, Surgery, University of Toronto
• President, Chief Research Officer and CEO, Compute Ontario,

Education

• MSc (Psychology and Physiology), University of Leeds
• PhD (Experimental Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience), McMaster University
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Kinesiology, McMaster University