2011 AAA Foundation Partnership with The Children’s Hospital—Colorado Features Ruth Litovsky, PhD

Each spring, Bill Daniels Center for Children’s Hearing at The Children’s Hospital—Colorado (TCH) offers the Advances in Children’s Hearing Lecture.  This lecture provides Denver area audiologists, hearing scientists, parents, and others interested in hearing health with current updates on topics pertinent to children’s hearing health. Thanks to a new partnership with the American Academy of Audiology Foundation, this educational presentation was offered live through eAudiology.org, allowing international access to the 2011 Advances Lecture. It is currently available on-demand. 

"Two Ears, One Brain: How well can bilateral cochlear implant users combine inputs from the two ears?" (.1 CEUs), was presented by Ruth Litovsky, PhD, Professor at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, on Thursday, April 28 at 7:30-8:30 pm (US Eastern Time {ET}). Dr. Litovsky discussed growing evidence that bilateral implant users perform better at sound localization and speech recognition in noise when using two implants compared with a single implant and the effect of limitations due to the fact that clinical processors are fitted independently in the two ears.  Additionally she presented her recent findings from traditional 'free field' testing approaches and her research on processors that enable the synchronization of inputs to the two ears. Dr. Litovsky’s research results were discussed in the context of auditory development and plasticity. 

Dr. Litovsky received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and with additional post-doctoral training in auditory neurophysiology.  She worked for seven years as a Research Associate at Boston University’s Hearing Research Center and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and later joined the University of Wisconsin—Madison faculty where she now directs the Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab at the Waisman Center.  She has served on numerous grant review panels, serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Journal of Audiology. She was elected fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and member of the Executive Council of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. She has published over 75 journal articles, book chapters and reports, and has given over 40 invited talks and keynote addresses.

A philanthropic grant to the AAA Foundation from Bill Daniels Center for Children’s Hearing will underwrite Dr. Litvosky’s presentation on the eAudiology platform. Dr. Litovsky’s presentation is available on-demand at no cost through December 2011.

This joint venture was facilitated by Deborah Hayes, PhD, chair of Audiology at TCH and former member of the Foundation Board of Trustees.  When this new endeavor was announced in January, Hayes stated, “Bill Daniels Center for Children’s Hearing at The Children’s Hospital – Colorado is excited to offer this outstanding educational program in partnership with the Foundation. We are especially pleased that through this collaboration our colleagues in audiology and hearing science throughout the world can ‘attend’ this event, ‘speak’ with Dr. Litovksy during real-time Q&A, and learn from her expertise and fascinating discoveries.”

Registration for the Lecture is now open at eAudiology.org.