Daniel Guest, PhD
Incoming fall 2026 Assistant Professor
Biography
Daniel Guest is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at the University of Iowa, supporting the AuD clinical degree program. His work investigates how people perceive sound in complex, real‑world environments and how those perceptual abilities relate to underlying neural mechanisms. The goal of his work is to better understand both typical and impaired hearing in order to help develop new pathways for hearing restoration.
Research Focus
Daniel Guest and the Computational Auditory Psychophysics lab focus on combining psychoacoustic methods with computational methods to investigate human hearing. The lab measures how different listeners make simple perceptual judgements about sound (e.g., "Which sound is louder?") in different scenarios. These behavioral data are then used to test competing theories of hearing with help from detailed computer models of the auditory periphery and tools from statistical estimation and information theory.
Current and past courses taught
- CSD:3113 Introduction to Hearing Science
- CSD:5256 Anatomy and Physiology of Hearing
- CSD:6249 Cochlear Implants
Selected publications
- Guest, D. R., Allen, E. J., Kay, K. N., & Arcaro, M. J. (2025). Processing of natural scenes in the human pulvinar. Nature Communications, 17(1), 789. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67472-3
- Guest, D. R., Cameron, D. A., Schwarz, D. M., Leong, U.-C., Richards, V. M., & Carney, L. H. (2024). Profile analysis in listeners with normal and elevated audiometric thresholds: Behavioral and modeling results. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 156(6), 4303-4325. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0034635
- Guest, D. R., & Oxenham, A. J. (2022). Human discrimination and modeling of high-frequency complex tones shed light on the neural codes for pitch. PLOS Computational Biology, 18(3), e1009889. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009889
Research or Clinical Areas
- Audiology and Hearing
