ABOUT ME
I am a Research Audiologist located in Omaha, NE.
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I have 17+ years of experience working on collaborative teams researching the outcomes of children and adults who are hard of hearing. I am passionate about community-led research, translating evidence into clinical practice via science communication, and advancing the field of research audiology.
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I invite you to take a look at my publications, infographics, posters, and visual abstracts. Feel free to get in touch with me to say hi, for more information about my work, or if you have questions about research audiology.
PROJECTS
OUTCOMES OF CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS
2008 - present
The OCHL Consortium involves multi-site, longitudinal projects designed to study the developmental outcomes of children who are hard of hearing. We collaborate with the University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to document linguistic, behavioral, cognitive, and hearing outcomes for children who are hard of hearing and children with typical hearing. One of our most important findings is that consistent use (>10 hrs/day) of well-fit hearing aids supports language development. We are continuing to see middle & high school adolescents who participated as young children to examine reading outcomes.
OTICON EDUMIC
2019-2020
We are working with Oticon Pediatrics to evaluate children's speech recognition in noisy and reverberant environments when using the Oticon EduMic remote microphone. We simulated a classroom reverberation time (RT60) of 0.3s and completed an adaptive sentence recognition task in noise. We found that children who are hard of hearing could understand more in noisier environments when using the remote microphone--both with and without reverberation.
Nebraska EHDI collaboration
2023 - present
We began this NIGMS-funded collaboration to address newborn hearing screening loss-to-follow-up in Nebraska. Our goals are to:
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Create partnership to improve hearing healthcare access for families in Nebraska.
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Learn from communities about barriers & facilitators to accessing hearing healthcare.
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Develop scalable, community-based action plan to address barriers.
We found that 3 out of 5 children born at home do not receive a newborn hearing screen. Our Community Advisory Board, composed of homebirth providers and parents, created a community-based action plan that we are now implementing.
FASTRAK - APC Lab, BTNRH
2020-2025
With the FASTRAK study, we aim to develop more accurate ways to test children’s hearing and develop clinical speech recognition tools that can help audiologists determine when children may benefit from being fit with amplification. These tools will be very useful for clinical audiologists who evaluate and treat children with mild hearing levels. We will be partnering with clinical sites at Boston Children’s Hospital, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, University of Iowa, and Washington University-St. Louis.