Realising the potential of cochlear implants

Professor Andrew King FMedSci FRS, University of Oxford, UK

Andrew King is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Neurophysiology at the University of Oxford and the Director of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics. He studied physiology at King’s College London and obtained his PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research. He has worked at the University of Oxford since then, with a spell at the Eye Research Institute in Boston, and his research has been supported by fellowships from the SERC, the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and the Wellcome Trust. Andrew was awarded the Wellcome Prize in Physiology and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Physiological Society. His group studies how the auditory brain adapts to the rapidly changing statistics that characterize real-life soundscapes, integrates other sensory and motor-related signals, and learns to compensate for the altered auditory inputs resulting from hearing impairment.

Professor Andrej Kral, Hannover Medical School, Germany

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.

Professor Tamar Makin, University College London, UK

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, Harvard Medical School, USA

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. 

Professor Ruth Litovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

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. 

Dr Hongmei Hu, Carl von Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg, Germany

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.

Professor Karen Gordon, The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Canada

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.

Dr Bob Carlyon, University of Cambridge, UK

Dr 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 Ph.D. 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. 

Dr Deborah Vickers, University of Cambridge, UK

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.