Mr. Wheatley is an EPSRC-funded PhD candidate embedded within the LISN Lab, the Imaging and Computer Vision Lancaster (iCVL) group, the Phonetics Lab, and the DSAIL doctoral cohort at Lancaster University. His thesis focuses on decoding spontaneous inner speech and classifying its emotional valence under naturalistic conditions. While existing silent-speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) primarily rely on cued speech production, Mr. Wheatley’s project targets unprompted, ruminative, and intrusive thoughts by developing a novel wearable BCI that combines electroencephalography (EEG) with ultrasound imaging of the tongue.