ABOUT ME
I am a Senior Research Audiologist in the Audibility, Perception, and Cognition laboratory (Director, Ryan McCreery, PhD) at Boys Town National Research Hospital. I am passionate about translating evidence into clinical practice and advancing the field of research audiology. My current career goals are to improve community engagement
within hearing research and to use effective science communication strategies to share study findings
with families, clinicians, and scientists. As part of that effort, I created this website to increase access to my published work and resources I have helped create. More resources on self-archiving and creating your own website can be found at www.csdisseminate.com.
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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 what the research audiology life is all about.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
FINDING APPROPRIATE SOLUTIONS TO TREAT REDUCED AUDIBILITY IN KIDS (FASTRAK)
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.
COMPLEX LISTENING SKILLS FOR SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN WHO ARE HARD OF HEARING
2013 - 2018; 2019 - 2024
In the Complex Listening studies, we are examining how auditory experience (hearing aid use and unaided/aided speech audibility) impact children's speech recognition outcomes. We are interested in finding out how children's linguistic and cognitive skills impact their ability to listen and understand, as well.
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.
OUTCOMES OF CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS
2008 - 2013
The OCHL study was a multi-site, longitudinal project designed to study the developmental outcomes of children who are hard of hearing. We collaborated 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.
