Current Employer: GN Advanced Science
Current Job Title: Research Scientist
When were you in the APC Lab? 2015-2020
What position did you have during your time at the APC Lab (e.g. PhD student, postdoc)? Junior Scientist and PhD student
What was your favorite project/paper from your time in the APC Lab? It’s so hard to pick just one! Experiences from two different projects stand out in my mind.
I did a fair amount of data collection that involved having middle-aged and older adults with normal hearing listen to speech that was processed to simulate the degraded sound those with cochlear implants might experience. Some of the participants I recruited were close family members and friends. It was neat to have them listen to degraded speech for an extended period of time and really experience what hearing and understanding speech on a daily basis is like for me. I think it created a level of understanding that would have been hard to replicate outside of the lab.
Another project I worked on during my time in the APC Lab involved creating and recording sentences without any contextual meaning. The stimuli are now online and available for anyone to use. It has been really cool to run into other scientists using these stimuli, especially since two of the recorded voices are my brother and father-in-law. It’s really funny to hear what other scientists think of their voices!
Favorite restaurant to grab a bite to eat in the Twin Cities/campus? My favorite restaurants on campus were Haiku and Annie’s Parlor. I always ate the Steak Bento Box at Haiku and a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake at Annie’s. Unfortunately, I think both places might have closed during the pandemic.
Do you have any funny stories about your time in the lab to share? Once I was running a particularly eccentric participant with cochlear implants on a task that involved listening for a probe tone among masking tones. The participant was instructed to hold down the Spacebar when they heard the probe tone and let go when they stopped hearing it. These trials would typically last about 10 minutes with the probe tone being audible and inaudible off and on throughout the trial. While I was monitoring one of these trials, I noticed that the participant was responding in a way that, well, seemed a little off, given the stimuli. After the trial finished, I looked at the participant’s head and noticed that she had forgotten to put her processor back on before she started the trial! She had given feedback for 10 minutes without hearing any of the actual stimuli! Just goes to show that those of us with severe hearing loss often have a lot of ambient sound floating around in our heads. :)
Favorite scientific conference to attend? The conference I enjoyed attending most during my time in the APC Lab was the Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication (CHSCOM) in Linkoping, Sweden. The conference had lots of interesting presentations about the role of the brain in hearing and how the brain changes and adapts with hearing loss. I had also never attended an international conference before and loved exploring Sweden with my husband after the conference concluded.
Any words of advice for current students/researchers? Look for opportunities to interact and work with people outside of your department. Scientists with different interests and skills bring fresh perspectives to the table and, in my experience, always made my research better. Building a network that extends beyond your immediate discipline is also very helpful when it comes to job searching in the future.