I'm currently in my 5th year of doctoral work, seeking PhDs in Neuroscience and Audiology. Although I enjoyed working as a pediatric audiologist, it left me with many questions and a desire to find better ways to fit hearing aids and validate those fittings for infants and toddlers. So here I am....
My research focuses on speech perception in infants and toddlers. We are using Visual Reinforcement Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) to investigate how infants and toddlers with hearing loss discriminate speech. I'm hoping that by assessing speech perception skills, hearing aids can be adjusted to optimally amplify speech, rather than 'just' making speech audible. This may mean taking a new look at hearing aid circuitry as well as our approach to fitting amplification for children.
I'm also interested in EEG and how it can be used to help us understand speech perception in infants who have hearing loss.
Once finished with school, I'm thinking about completing a post-doc that would allow me to explore my interest in EEG and its correlation to VRISD performance. Otherwise, my goal is to teach in a university setting as well as continue these lines of research.