Introductory Keynotes
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Graham Naylor
Title:
From audiogram to psychosocial consequences - via cognition, behaviour and the deeper purpose of conversation
Biography:
Graham Naylor is Director of the Scottish Section of the University of Nottingham’s Hearing Sciences research group, and a Professor of Hearing Sciences. Prior to 2015, Graham worked for 20+ years at Oticon’s Eriksholm Research Centre in Denmark, from 2000-2013 as Director. In that post he led numerous projects which have impacted the wider field of hearing-aid R&D, including co-founding the Hearing Industry Research Consortium. He was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the VA National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research, Portland, Oregon (2013-2016), and is immediate Past-President of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology. Initially trained as an acoustical engineer, he studied how musicians adapt to the acoustics of auditoria, and authored the original of the widely-used ODEON room acoustical modelling software, before moving into hearing aid research. His current research interests are concerned with how our sense of hearing is used in real life, and how cognition, behaviour and environment interact with hearing loss to produce the tapestry of phenomena we recognise as hearing disability and handicap. This also encompasses the real-world behaviour of hearing devices and their wearers, and identification of ensuing opportunities for improving interventions and their delivery.
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Ingrid Johnsrude
Title:
What does it mean to ‘listen harder’?
Biography:
Dr. Johnsrude completed a PhD in Clinical Psychology at McGill University, in 1997, supervised by pioneering neuropsychologist Brenda Milner. After 7 years in the UK, first as a postdoctoral fellow at UCL, and then as a research scientist with the MRC in Cambridge, she returned to her alma mater, Queen's University, Canada where she held a Canada Research Chair. She was recruited to Western University in 2014, as the first Western Research Chair. Individuals in Dr Johnsrude’s lab use psychophysical and neuroimaging methods such as fMRI and EEG to study the cognitive and neural basis of successful speech perception when listening is challenging. The team’s award-winning work, published in over 120 papers, has been cited over 27,000 times. Postdoctoral and graduate trainees have gone onto professional careers in audiology, clinical psychology, industrial research and data science, and to academic positions in Canada, the US, the UK and Europe.
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Keynotes
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Helen Henshaw
Title:
Riding the waves of computer-based auditory training: a decade of primary research and evidence syntheses.
Biography:
Helen is a Chartered Psychologist, Principal Research Fellow, and NIHR Career Development Fellow in Hearing Sciences at the University of Nottingham and NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre. Working alongside clinical and academic colleagues, Helen’s research is concerned with the development and assessment of novel interventions to support adults with hearing loss and those with whom they communicate. Her research portfolio spans research priority setting, patient and public co-production in research, intervention development, feasibility studies, clinical trials, and systematic reviews.
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Simon Carlile
Title:
The Interacting Brain: Some insights from 2nd Person Neuroscience.
Biography:
Executive, strategist, entrepreneur and researcher focused on translating new technologies for delivering on human needs and building innovative and sustainable solutions. Simon works for Alphabet’s The Moonshot Factory in Silicon Valley, California. Simon has a BSc (Hons) and PhD from the University of Sydney in Auditory Neuroscience, postdoctoral training at University of Oxford (UK) where he was a Junior Research Fellow of Green College and a Lecturer in Neuroscience for Pembroke College. Simon established the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Sydney and was Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Medical Sciences. He is currently an Honorary Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences, Macquarie University. Simon has published more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed international journals, edited a foundation volume on Auditory Virtual Reality and is Associate Editor for Nature’s Scientific Reports. Simon has had two spin-off companies in the audio space, one of which brought new processing algorithms for listening devices to market. As Vice President for Research at Starkey Hearing Technology, Simon developed a user centered research and technology strategy to reposition the hearing aid as a platform for health and wellness using biosensing. In 2018 Simon joined The Moonshot Factory, Alphabet’s R&D force and is the technical lead for a major moonshot project.
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Jonathan Simon
Title:
The progression of neural speech representations through auditory cortex and beyond, from acoustics to semantics
Biography:
Jonathan Simon is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, holding faculty positions in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Department of Biology, and the Institute for Systems Research. He is co-director of the KIT-Maryland Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Center, and of the Computational Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory. His main expertise is in applied and theoretical neuroscience, with emphasis on auditory neuroscience. His primary research field is the neural foundations of speech processing and perception (especially for degraded speech), including the role of auditory attention and the effects of aging. He holds a bachelors in physics (Princeton University), a doctorate in physics (University of California, Santa Barbara), and had postdoctoral training in theoretical general relativity (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and University of Maryland, College Park) before embracing the field of neuroscience.
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Thomas Lunner
Title:
Understanding Communication Difficulties from an Egocentric Perspective
Biography:
Dr Thomas Lunner is a research scientist and research manager at Meta / Reality Labs Research where he leads research in superhuman hearing for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
Previously Dr Lunner lead research at the hearing aid manufacturer Demant/Oticon and their research centre Eriksholm, as well being adjunct professor in automatic control at Linkoping University. Furthermore, he was an adjunct professor in Hearing Technologies at the Danish Technical University. His PhD in the 90’ies laid the ground for the first commercial digital hearing aid, where his patented technology was sold to the world leading hearing aid company Demant/Oticon. In 1995 the patented digital signal processing algorithms lead to the first digital hearing aid, Digifocus. The DSP was used in several successive hearing aid models from 1995 up until 2013, fitted to millions of hearing aid users worldwide. Two of the models were awarded with the European Union´s prestigious technology prize IST Grand Prize in 1996 and in 2003.
Dr Lunner was part of initiating the new research field of cognitive hearing science together with researchers at Linkoping University. The cognitive hearing science group at Linköping University was awarded a 10-year research grant from the Swedish Research Council (2008-2018). Dr Lunner also received 3 prestigious European Union research program grants, of which the most notable one was the Cognitive Controlled Hearing Aid (COCOHA), which was a 4-year program gathering 5 European institutions. In this project, sensor fusion was introduced to hearing aids where both eye movements by means of electro-oculography, and electric brain activity, EEG, are used to affect signal processing in the hearing aids.
Thomas became the alumni of the year 2016 at Linkoping University and was 2017 named the First Fellow at Demant for outstanding performance and contributions in research and development. H-index 48.
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Speakers
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Martijn Agterberg
Biography:
Dr. Martijn Agterberg is a Neuropsychologist, Audiologist and Neuroscientist, with over 30 peer-reviewed publications. His current affiliations are; i) the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the Radboudumc, ii) the Department of Biophysics at the Donders Centre for Neuroscience at Radboud University, and iii) University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht, Brain Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. He has over 20 years of research experience addressing different aspects of the auditory system, as plasticity, degeneration, sound localisation in animal models and psychophysics in patients with different types of hearing loss. Recently his study of the dynamic ears of bees received a lot of media attention in the Netherlands. Currently Martijn is performing a technical and commercial feasibility study for a new implant with a better noise reduction based on superior directional microphones. His recent work is focussing on the optimal treatment of unilateral and or bilateral conductive hearing loss and he is advocating the importance of a multidisciplinary team for counselling of the patients.
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Josefine Andin
Biography:
Josefine Andin is an Associate Professor in Disability Research and director of studies in Disability Research at the Department of Behavioural sciences and Learning at Linköping university. In her research, she uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes cognitive tasks, such as working memory and mathematic, when it is optimized for visual language (i.e. sign language). She is also involved in research concerning emotion processing, language comprehension in noise and mental fatigue.
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Florine Lena Bachmann
Biography:
Florine Bachmann, PhD, is a scientist at Eriksholm Research Centre, part of Oticon. She holds a BSc and MSc in Psychology from University of Zurich, with a focus on Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience. When studying in Zurich, she also worked at Sonova investigating comorbidities to hearing loss, such as dementia. Her fascination for emerging computational methods in auditory cognitive neuroscience led her to the Technical University of Denmark, where she recently successfully defended her PhD in collaboration with Sonova. In her PhD project, Florine investigated what drives the subcortical electrophysiological response to running speech, its measurement reliability in older hearing-impaired listeners, and applied it to gain a deeper understanding of speech processing along the auditory pathway in the presence of hearing loss. Her results may pave the way for using subcortical responses to running speech in clinical diagnosis and hearing rehabilitation. In her current work at Eriksholm Research Centre, she is now extending some of these insights towards improving future hearing care technology.
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Brilliant
Biography:
Born in Indonesia, where there is no particular rule regarding name giving, Brilliant is often asked about his name during his stay in Germany, due to having only one name. He came to Hannover, Germany to pursue higher education, which eventually becomes his second hometown. He studied mechatronic at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University Hannover. He later found his interest in the biology and medicine, which led him to continue his study in the field of biomedical-engineering at the same university. Currently he’s taking a PhD at the Hannover Medical School in auditory-neuroscience, where his research focuses on the oscillatory activities during auditory tasks to better understand the cognitive aspects of hearing. Being novel in the cognitive neuroscience, he considers himself fortunate for being able to learn about the discoveries in the field while making contributions with his engineering background through time series data analysis.
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Bryony Buck
Biography:
Bryony Buck is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Hearing Sciences – Scottish Section. Her work examines communication behaviour during 2-person and small-group conversations with respect to hearing impairment. Her previous research included gestural communication of music structure by solo pianists and resulting audience perceptions in at the University of Glasgow and investigating motor control in high-speed drumming performance and skill acquisition in the Institute of Musicians’ Medicine Dresden, Germany. Bryony’s research involves using 3D motion capture, EMG, speech detection and facial expression production and perception. These are used to explore aspects of non-verbal, or extra-linguistic, communication that help those with and without hearing loss overcome challenging situations, such as noisy, complex listening environments, group conversations or virtual interactions.
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Sarah Colby
Biography:
Sarah Colby is a postdoctoral scholar in the Departments of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Iowa. She completed her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Her research interests include age-related changes to language processing, especially how the interaction between cognitive and sensory factors impact spoken word recognition, and compensatory processing strategies for adverse listening conditions. As part of the Cochlear Implant Research Center, she is currently working on projects investigating the dynamics of lexical processing in individuals with cochlear implants.
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Lorenz Fiedler
Biography:
Lorenz Fiedler is interested in the neurophysiology of auditory attention and cognitive effort in continuous listening scenarios. After training in electrical engineering, he did his PhD at the University of Lübeck, where he used electroencephalography to investigate how attention shapes the neural responses to continuous speech. In his current position as a scientist at the Eriksholm Research Centre he studies the interaction of attention and listening effort on combined physiological measures such as EEG and pupillometry. He is interested in how these measures may explain individual challenges during real-life listening scenarios both in hearing impaired and normally hearing listeners.
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Vanessa Frei
Biography:
I completed my bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Zurich in the field of psychology with a focus on cognitive neuroscience. As part of my master's thesis, I investigated bodily and neural plasticity in the form of embodiment and which socio-cognitive attitudes are associated with altered bodily states and whether they can be influenced by them. I mainly worked with virtual body illusions and electroencephalography. Since June 2021, I am a PhD student in the Computational Neuroscience of Speech & Hearing group at the Department of Computational Linguistics. My research currently focuses on the relationship between hearing loss and dementia with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the underlying neural changes in order to develop potential preventive interventions and training in dementia research. Specifically, I would like to investigate whether natural and realistic immersion of audio-cognitive training supports neural, as well as subjectively experienced, speech processing in older adults with hearing impairment, and whether there is evidence of transfer to everyday life. Age-related hearing loss has enormous potential as a modifiable risk
factor for dementia, although it is unclear whether traditional therapies (e.g., hearing aids) are sufficient or whether individual neural processing of language can be improved through realistic and engaging training. It is particularly important to me that my work goes beyond fundamental research and potentially promotes applications in everyday life in the future (e.g., training games, mobile apps, etc.).
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Anders Fridberger
Biography:
Dr. Fridberger is Professor of Neuroscience at Linköping University, with a guest appointment at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR, USA. His research deals with mechanisms for sound encoding in the cochlea, but he also has a significant interest in age-related hearing loss and in developing novel treatments and new diagnostic approaches for hearing disorders.
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Emily Frost
Biography:
I work as a part-time PhD student at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London and as the Lead Scientist for Education, Learning and Development at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. I have worked in audiology for over 10 years and have developed an interest in bridging the gap between clinical and academic careers in Healthcare Science. My research interests are in participatory design, self-management of long-term health conditions and the use of serious games in health management. My PhD work is focussed on developing and evaluating an auditory-cognitive training application that has been co-produced. As a result of the disruption caused by covid-19, I have also produced an online version of the Digit Triplet Test that produces SNR scores.
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Christian Füllgrabe
Biography:
Christian Füllgrabe is an Associated Professor in Audiological Sciences at the UCL Ear Institute, London (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris - René Descartes (France) and was a postdoctoral fellow in Brian Moore’s Hearing Lab at the University of Cambridge (UK). He also worked as a Senior Investigator Scientist at the MRC Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham (UK) and as a Lecturer in Psychology at Loughborough University (UK). His research focuses on the role of supra-threshold auditory and cognitive processing abilities in speech-in-noise identification across the adult lifespan.
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Nicole Grant
Biography:
I am currently completing my master’s degree in clinical psychology at Concordia University under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Phillips. I will commence my PhD studies at Concordia University in the Fall of 2022. My research interests include investigating the relationships between sensory, neural, and cognitive functioning. My current research uses functional MRI to explore the relationship between hearing ability and brain connectivity in older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease. I am a trainee at the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging’s Team 17 and a student member at the Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music. Upon the completion of my PhD, I hope to work as a clinical neuropsychologist. My clinical interests include neuropsychological assessment, and I currently do assessments for children with genetic neurodegenerative diseases at the McGill University Health Centre.
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Björn Holtze
Biography:
Björn Holtze is a 3rd year PhD student in the Neuropsychology Lab at the University of Oldenburg. He studied Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and Neurocognitive Psychology at the University of Oldenburg. Within his PhD he works on auditory selective attention in multi-speaker scenarios measured with traditional high-density cap Electroencephalography (EEG) and portable, unobtrusive around-the-ear EEG solutions like the cEEGrid. He investigates attentional aspects in the neural tracking of the speech envelope and the brain synchrony of listeners attending to the same speech stream. His work also addresses to which degree mobile and portable EEG acquisition devices can reliably track measures of attention to natural auditory scenes.
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Sarah Knight
Biography:
Sarah Knight is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of York, UK, where her work is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She received her PhD from the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, and has subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of Nottingham, Queen Mary University of London and University College London. Her current research investigates the contribution of cognitive abilities to the perception of speech-in-noise across the lifespan, and the interaction of cognitive, sensory and acoustic factors during speech-in-noise listening. She is also interested in voice perception more broadly, including how we learn to recognise others from their voices, how we make trait judgements from voices (such as attractiveness and trustworthiness), and how these processes influence the ways we interact with voices and their owners.
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Patrycja Książek
Biography:
Patrycja Książek holds a MSc degree in Engineering Acoustics from Technical University of Denmark. She is currently a PhD candidate at Amsterdam UMC location Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in an ITN project HEAR-ECO. Through this project, she is also affiliated with Eriksholm Research Centre. Her PhD work aims to explore and develop novel pupil measures as means to understand how and when do people allocate their effort during speech perception. She is interested in understanding complex relationship between the cognition, physiology, and human behaviour through mathematical and statistical time series modelling approaches.
Patrycja presented her PhD groundwork at CHSCOM 2019 (Linnaeus Centre HEAD scholarship) and is excited to come back and present the follow-up study.
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Bas Labree
Biography:
Bas Labree is a third year PhD student in Hearing Sciences at the University of Nottingham, working under the supervision of Dr Magdalena Sereda. His work relates to the optimisation of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) for tinnitus. With this aim in mind, he has synthesised the existing evidence on the effectiveness of tDCS for tinnitus and tinnitus-related outcomes in a systematic review. He has also been using neuroimaging methods to better understand the mechanism by which tDCS may affect tinnitus. Finally, he has been using e-Delphi methodology in an attempt to establish consensus on which outcomes should be measured in trials of tDCS for tinnitus.
Bas gained a BSc hons in Psychology with Cognitive Neuroscience (2016) and an MSc in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience (2017) from Goldsmiths, University of London.
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Steve Lomber
Biography:
Stephen G. Lomber, Ph.D. is a Professor of Physiology, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at McGill University where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Brain Plasticity and Development. Dr. Lomber received degrees in Neurobiology from the University of Rochester (B.Sc.) and the Boston University School of Medicine (Ph.D.). Dr. Lomber’s lab (www.cerebralsystems.ca) uses an integrated approach of psychophysics, electrophysiological recording, neuroanatomical techniques, and functional imaging to examine processing in the auditory cortex. His lab has pioneered the use of focal cooling to reversibly deactivate regions of the cerebrum. Work in his lab examines cortical plasticity in the presence and absence of acoustic input and following the initiation of auditory processing through the means of cochlear prosthetics. Dr. Lomber serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Academy of Audiology and is on the Editorial Board of Hearing Research.
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Ulrika Marklund
Biography:
Senior Lecturer, PhD, Speech-Language Pathologist. Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences (BKV), Division of Sensory Organs and Communication (SOK), Linköping University. Affiliated with Karolinska Institutet, CLINTEC, Division of Speech-Langauge Pathology. Degree of Speech and Language Pathology program, Lund University, 1992. PhD in Phonetics, Stockholm University, 2018. Thesis: Turn-taking and early phonology: Contingency in parent-child interaction and assessment of early speech production.
Main research interests:
· Gestural and lexical development in children with language disorder and deaf children with cochlear implants.
· Adult-child interaction: impact of adult communicative behavior on child communication development.
· Phonological development and assessment of early expressive phonology.
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Kate McClannahan
Biography:
Kate McClannahan is an Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Audiology and Communication Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She received her Au.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington and completed postdoctoral training in cognitive aging in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. McClannahan studies age-related hearing loss and cognitive aging, and how they interact. The work in her Auditory Wellness Laboratory centers around how psychological factors, such as personality and cognitive ability, contribute to self-reported hearing difficulties and hearing loss treatment decisions in older adults. Her work also addresses the need to improve the identification, assessment, and treatment of hearing loss and communication difficulties in adults with dementia.
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Isabelle Mosnier
Biography:
Doctor Isabelle Mosnier is an ENT Doctor of Medicine from University of Paris 7. She is director of the center of hearing implants for adults and deputy head at the Department of Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery, and the director of the centre of clinical research in Audiology in GH Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris. Further commitments include memberships of the different French associations: “Association Française d’Otologie et d’Otoneurologie” (AFON), “Société Française d' ORL et de pathologie Cervico-faciale”(SFORL) and in the board of the “Société Française d’Audiologie”(SFA).
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Katie Neal
Biography:
Katie Neal is an Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University and holds a Master’s degree in Research, a Masters in Clinical Audiology and a Bachelor degrees in Health Science and Advanced Science (Neuroscience). Her research synthesises the experiences and perspectives of people who can first-hand describe the disconnect between audiological measurement and real-world experience, as well as the lack of acknowledgement and poor understanding of the extensive impact of communication difficulties related to hearing. Katie’s research, clinical knowledge and lived experience highlights that communication challenges need to be understood and measured in the context in which they are experienced and must be considered from the perspective of those that experience it.
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Carine Signoret
Biography:
Dr. Carine Signoret is a senior lecturer at the University of Linköping, Sweden in the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Lyon, France, where she studied the neural correlates of subliminal auditory perception using electroencephalography. Her current studies focus on behavioural and neuroimaging methods to investigate how such a complex auditory signal that is speech could be perceived with ease. And she is convinced that it is not only a question of psychology, considering an interdisciplinary approach as indispensable to carry out issues encountered in the field of Cognitive Hearing Science for a better understanding and implementing of the observed effects.
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Martin Skoglund
Biography:
Martin’s research interests are sensor fusion, modeling, and estimation of nonlinear systems. He works with many types of sensors such as, vision, inertial, audio, EEG, electromagnetic, with the purpose of finding solutions for future hearing care technology.
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Carlos Tirado
Biography:
I'm Carlos Tirado and I recently finished my PhD in psychology at Stockholm University. I started my work in embodied language and spatial cognition. However, my PhD work focused on the psychophysics of human echolocation. More precisely, individual differences in echolocation performance, training echolocation, and new methods to measure echolocation more effectively. Now I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Linköping University studying speech perception and comprehension in noisy environments, its relationships with higher cognitive functions, and other basic hearing phenomena.
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Johannes Zaar
Biography:
Johannes Zaar is a senior scientist at Eriksholm Research Centre and a guest researcher at the Technical University of Denmark. He holds an MSc in Audio Engineering from Graz University of Technology and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, where he focused on spatial hearing and sound-field analysis. He went on to pursue a PhD at the Technical University of Denmark focusing on measures and computational models of microscopic speech perception. After completion of his PhD study, Johannes worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark with an emphasis on speech perception in (aided) hearing-impaired listeners utilizing and developing psychoacoustic methods and advanced computational models of auditory processing. Fascinated by the various connections between auditory modelling and electrophysiological attention tracking methods, he transitioned to Eriksholm Research Centre, where he has since investigated neural speech processing in ecologically valid audio-visual scenarios whilst continuing psychoacoustic and modelling-based research on speech perception.
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