Dr Simon Ruch

Since January 2023, I am an advanced post-doc at the Faculty of Psychology at UniDistance Suisse. My fields of expertise are human memory, sleep, and consciousness. In my work, I study how humans make and retrieve memories, and I investigate how sleep contributes to the strengthening of newly acquired knowledge and to the renewal of next-day learning capacity. In these endeavors, I use noninvasive brain stimulation techniques such as auditory stimulation during sleep or transcranial electrical stimulation to alter and improve memory and sleep. Due to my interest in the mechanisms and functions of consciousness, I further investigate the role of conscious mentation in the formation and retrieval of memories. I study whether and how memories can be formed outside of conscious awareness, e.g., during sleep.

I graduated in psychology in 2010 at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and then went on to do a PhD in the group of Prof. Dr. Katharina Henke in Bern. I received my PhD in psychology in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in a project on learning during sleep within an interfaculty research cooperation at the University of Bern. I interrupted this position for a brief research visit at the Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland). From 2021 to 2022, I held a post-doc position in the group of Prof. Dr. Alireza Gharabaghi at Institute for Neuromodulation and Neurotechnology at the University Hospital of Tübingen (Germany).
In my academic appointments, I gained a lot of teaching experience on the undergraduate and graduate level. I gave courses, lectures, and seminars on various psychological (memory, sleep, and consciousness) and methodological topics (experimental methods, processing and statistical analysis of behavioral, electrophysiology, and fMRI data, programming with Matlab and python, scientific communication).