Realising the potential of cochlear implants - POSTPONED

After an initial start in human audiology in Brussels, Antoine Huet followed his interest for auditory physiology at the Institute for Neuroscience of Montpellier. He re-established in-vivo single unit recordings from the auditory nerve fibres to study auditory information encoding by the first synapse of the auditory pathway. During his PhD, in combination with a behavioural approach, he revisited the mechanisms of sound encoding at single neuron and population level in the presence of background noise, highlighting the robustness of phase-locking in masking condition. He also collaborated in the development of new clinical tools to study human auditory nerve properties.

In 2017, he moved his interest to hearing restoration and joined the ‘hearing the light’ project headed by Professor Tobias Moser. Now, using in-vivo single neuron electrophysiology and computation, in combination with optogenetic and photopharmacological stimulation, he is investigating the restoration of temporal coding by light in the auditory pathway.

John Middlebrooks grew up in Southern California. He was trained at Caltech (BS), UC San Francisco (PhD, with Michael Merzenich), and Stanford (post-doc, with Eric Knudsen). He has held faculty positions at the University of Florida, University of Michigan, and now at UC Irvine. Throughout his career, he has worked on the physiology and psychophysics of binaural and spatial hearing. In Michigan, he also began working on central auditory responses to cochlear-implant stimulation. In collaboration with Russell Snyder, that work evolved into animal studies of restoration of hearing with a penetrating auditory nerve electrode. Ongoing studies at UCI with collaborator Harrison Lin are focused on evaluating the auditory nerve prosthesis in long-term animal studies and, then, translating that prosthesis to human trials. Dr Middlebrooks has served as the Conference Chair for the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses and the President of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

Bob Carlyon has studied human hearing since the early 1980s. Much of his early research investigated the basic auditory mechanisms that allow us to listen to one voice in a mixture of competing sounds, and how these mechanisms interact with cognitive processes such as attention and linguistic knowledge. More recently he has studied the limitations on hearing, including difficulty in separating competing sounds, experienced by cochlear implant users. His research uses a wide range of behavioural, physiological, computational, and neuro-imaging techniques. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University, and his previous appointments include a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which he held at Sussex University. He has won the Acoustical Society of America’s R. Bruce Lindsay award and the British Society of Audiology’s Thomas Simm Littler prize. He is currently Deputy Director of the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University. 

Johan Frijns is chairman of the Centre for Audiology and Hearing Implants at LUMC (CAHIL). He has a Master’s degree in Applied Physics (Hons, Delft), an MD degree (Hons, Leiden) and a PhD degree (Hons, Leiden). In 1994 he was certified as an ENT-consultant, and thereafter sub-specialised in (neuro-)otology. Since 2005 he has been a full professor in Otology and Auditory Physics and the main supervisor of the ENT residency program at LUMC. 

Building on the growing body of translational research of his group, he founded the Leiden CI and ABI program in 1999, which now has implanted almost 1200 adults and children. Frijns is teacher in a number of post-academic courses, organised several international conferences and serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals. He has published over 165 peer-reviewed scientific papers and supervised over 20 PhD theses.

Dr Pfingst received his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, USA and followed with Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Washington, USA with Dr Josef Miller. His research over the past 40 years has focused on auditory prostheses and has included psychophysics, electrophysiology, and neuroanatomy in non-human primates, guinea pigs and mice as well as psychophysical, electrophysiological, and speech-recognition research with implanted adult human subjects. His laboratory, in conjunction with the laboratory of Yehoash Raphael, is currently developing and testing procedures in guinea pigs and mice for preservation or restoration of the cochlear health in implanted ears and determining effects of cochlear health on various measures of implant function. Work in humans is done in close collaboration with Kara Schvartz-Leyzac and Terry Zwolan uses the same functional measures that are tested in animals to assess cochlear health in implanted humans and apply these results in developing rehabilitation strategies to improve speech recognition and overall quality of life in cochlear implant users.  

Mario Svirsky is the first Noel L. Cohen Professor of Hearing Science and Vice-Chairman of Research at the Department of Otolaryngology, New York University School of Medicine. His initial training was in Electrical Engineering (Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay), and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering (Tulane University). He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Speech Communication Group, where he stayed as a Research Scientist until 1995. Before joining NYU in 2005 he was at the Department of Otolaryngology, Indiana University School of Medicine, with joint appointments in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering (Purdue University). He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the ASHA, and AIMBE, and is a member of the Collegium Otolaryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum, as well as an IEEE senior member. He has been an elected Co-Chairman of the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses. He is Editor-in-Chief, Emeritus, of the journal Ear and Hearing. Svirsky’s research has been funded since 1992 by grants from NIH, private foundations, and the Uruguayan government, as well as cochlear implant and hearing aid companies. His recent work focuses on the extent and limitations of human auditory plasticity, as well as investigating how humans integrate acoustic and electrical auditory information.

Dr Deborah Vickers is a Principal Research Associate in the Clinical Neurosciences Department at the University of Cambridge, funded by a Medical Research Council Senior Fellowship in Hearing Research. She leads the ‘Sensory Optimisation Using Neuroscience for Devices’ (SOUND) Lab, where research is focused on understanding sound perception, impact of neuroplasticity on auditory discrimination, and clinical interventions to optimise outcomes with auditory implants and hearing aids. Dr Vickers is a Speech and Hearing scientist with an extensive research background from University College London and the University of Cambridge.  Previous research areas include: improving speech perception for profoundly deafened adults; understanding cochlear dead regions; factors affecting speech and language development in children with cochlear implants; using electrophysiology measures to guide remapping and understand brain changes in cochlear implant users. Dr Vickers has been instrumental in updating the NICE guidelines on cochlear implant candidacy in the UK.

Andrew King is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Oxford. He heads the Auditory Neuroscience Group and is the Director of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, and is also the Director of the Wellcome Doctoral Training Programme in Neuroscience at Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College. He received his undergraduate training in physiology at King’s College London and a PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research. He then moved to Oxford, where he has been supported by fellowships from the Science and Engineering Research Council, the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and the Wellcome Trust. He has also been a visiting scientist at the Eye Research Institute in Boston. He was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2011, a Fellow of the Physiological Society in 2017, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.

Andrej Kral was born in Bratislava and studied general medicine (Comenius University). His first research position was at the Institute of Pathological Physiology, Comenius University (1992–1995). During his PhD, in collaboration with the Mathematical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science (Professor V Majernik), he developed computer models of neuronal networks. In 1995, he moved to Germany to focus on cochlear implants and in vivo neurophysiology at the Institute of Sensory Physiology, J.W.Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Professor R Klinke). There he was appointed associate professor of physiology ('Priv-Doz') in 2002. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Hamburg. Since 2009 he has been Chaired Professor of Auditory Neuroscience at the Medical University Hannover and the director of research of the ENT clinics. Andrej Kral heads the Department of Experimental Otology and is the scientific director of the Joint Institute of AudioNeuroTechnology in Hannover. Since 2004 he has been Adjunct Professor of Neuroscience and Cognition at The University of Texas at Dallas, USA and since 2018 Professor of Systems Neuroscience at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He serves as chair of the PhD Program 'Auditory Sciences' at the Medical University Hannover. In 2018, A Kral was elected member of the Collegium Oto- Rhino-Laryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum (CORLAS) and in 2017 member of the German National Academy of Science.

Kral’s research interests include neuroscience of deafness, cochlear implants, brain development and plasticity and cross-modal reorganisation. His research has been published, among others, in New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Lancet Neurology and Nature Neuroscience, his cumulative IF exceeds 400. Andrej Kral gave more than 150 invited talks at international conferences and research institutions around the globe. Together with AN Popper and RR Fay he edited the volume of the Springer Handbook of Auditory Research on Deafness (vol. 47). The lab received funding from German Research Society (DFG), Common Scientific Conference Germany, National Institutes of Health (USA), National Science Foundation (USA), German Academic Exchange Service, European Union, State of Hamburg and State of Lower Saxony, Oticon Foundation and cochlear implant industry.

Tamar Makin is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, UK and leader of the Plasticity Lab www.plasticity-lab.com. Professor Makin's main interest is in understanding how our body representation changes in the brain (brain plasticity). The primary model for this work is studying individuals with a hand loss. Professor Makin graduated from the Brain and Behavioural Sciences programme at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2009 and was then awarded several career development fellowships (Royal Society, European Commission, Wellcome Trust) to establish a research programme on brain plasticity in amputees at the University of Oxford, first as Research Fellow and later as a Principle Investigator. In 2016 Professor Makin joined the faculty of UCL to continue this work. Professor Makin is generously supported by the ERC (Starting Grant) and the WT (Senior Research Fellow). 

Dr Yoojin Chung is an Instructor in Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School and Eaton-Peabody Laboratories of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (Boston, USA). She obtained her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea) and her doctorate in biomedical engineering at Boston University (Boston, USA). Dr Chung’s research focuses on understanding how the auditory system processes sounds presented through cochlear implants (CI) with the goal of improving the perceptual performance in CI users. Dr Chung employs neurophysiology, theoretical studies with computational modelling and comparison with human studies to address various open questions in hearing science. 

Ruth Litovsky is Oros Family chair, department chair and director of the Binaural hearing and speech lab at the Waisman Center. She received her PhD in psychology and psychoacoustics and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in auditory neuroscience. She has published over 120 papers and book chapters. Her research focuses hearing abilities covering lifespan of humans to include infants and elderly adults. Her research program focuses on hearing restoration with cochlear implants, in particular the impact of bilateral implantation, and more recently single-sided deafness. Her lab also uses pupillometry and eye gaze measures to examine ‘real time’ processing of information and listening effort during perceptual tasks. Her lab is also beginning to study auditory function in conjunction with cognition and language in young adults with Down Syndrome.

Professor Litovsky teaches courses in undergraduate and graduate programs, serves on numerous national and international grant review panels and editorial boards, and in various positions of leadership in the research community. She is President Elect of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. She has received a number of awards, including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship. Her lab has over 20 students, postdoctoral fellows, engineers and audiologists. Her ongoing research program has been funded for over 20 years by grants from the NIH-NIDCD. 

After Dr Hu achieved her PhD in Information and Signal Processing at Southeast University, China, she moved to the United Kingdom and worked as a Marie Curie senior researcher at Southampton University in 2010. Then she was promoted from a lecturer to a tenured associate professor in Jiangsu University, China in 2012 where she received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees. For personal interests, Dr Hu moved to Carl von Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg, Germany in 2013 to continue her researches in the field of the binaural hearing, especially focusing on further developing new techniques for bilateral cochlear implants (CIs). Dr Hu's current main research threads are: 1) subjective perception (psychoacoustic) and objective (Electroencephalography, EEG) measurements based fitting strategies for CI users; 2) advanced signal processing and electric modelling for CIs; 3) speech in noise for tonal and non-tonal languages using our newly developed Mandarin and the exist Matrix sentence tests.

Karen Gordon, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology and a Graduate Faculty Member in the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. She works at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, as a Senior Scientist in the Research Institute and an Audiologist in the Department of Communication Disorders. She is Director of Research in Archie’s Cochlear Implant Laboratory and holds the Bastable-Potts Health Clinician Scientist Award in Hearing Impairment and Cochlear Americas Chair of Auditory Development. Karen’s research focuses on auditory development in children who are deaf and use auditory prostheses including cochlear implants. Her work is supported by research funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research along with the Cochlear Americas Chair in Auditory Development and generous donations.