Our affiliated Ph.D. student Gizem Babaoğlu has been selected for an International Research PhD Fellowship from TUBITAK. We have invited Gizem to visit us and work at our lab. Her visit will be from December 2021 for a 12 months period.

Gizem joined the dB SPL group in 2019 as a researcher of the joint project with Hacettepe and Sonova Vocal Emotion Perception of Children with Hearing Aids. During her research visit, she will be focusing on her PhD thesis investigating voice perception abilities of CI and bi-modal users with PICKA test battery and completing the joint project.

Congratulations Gizem!

Minke de Boer will be defending her PhD on Wednesday, 13 October 2001, 16:15hr.

Minke was co-supervised by me and Frans Cornelissen, in a truly collaborative project between KNO and Ophthalmology departments. Minke explored audiovisual emotion perception with audio and visual impairments, using also eye tracking methods. Her thesis title is: “Keeping track of emotions: Audiovisual integration for emotion recognition and compensation for sensory degradations captured by perceptual strategies” and the link to the book is here:
https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/latest-news/events/promoties/promoties-2021?hfId=120533

The defense will also be broadcasted at this link:
www.rug.nl/digitalphd

Leanne Nagels successfully defended her PhD on 23 September. Leanne’s thesis title is “From Voice to Speech: the perception of voice characteristics and speech in children with cochlear implants.” The reading committee was Prof. Carolyn McGettigan, Prof. Hartmut Meister, and Prof. Wander Lowie.

The thesis can be downloaded here:
https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/from-voice-to-speech-the-perception-of-voice-characteristics-and-

A recording of the defense is at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn-O6lxc48E

The 3rd International Music and CI Symposium will be held in Cambridge, 15-16 Sep 2021, and organized by the Cambridge Hearing Group. Deniz will give an invited talk on potential music training effects on vocal emotion perception, a difficult task by many implant users. The other presentations are:

Deniz is invited to give a talk at ISAAR Conference, International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research 2021: The Auditory System Throughout Life – Models, Mechanisms, and Interventions. Deniz will present Leanne Nagels’ PhD work on voice and speech perception by children with normal hearing and with cochlear implants.

Deniz is invited to give a talk at the next Cochlear Science and Research Seminar (CSRS) on the topic of  Bimodal Implantation in the Adult Population. The talk will cover our recent work on voice perception, especially with a focus on voice pitch perception and voice gender categorisation, with bimodal implant simulations.

The full program is here:
https://www.cochlearevents.com/education/webinar/ci-clinicians/csrs/csrs-bimodal-in-the-adult-population/

Proud to announce that our new project Audiolistic in partnerships with NSDSK and Pento is funded by  ZonMw Programma Expertisefunctie Zintuiglijk Gehandicapten.
The official title our project is “Insight in the conditions to participate in daily life for young children with moderate hearing loss: Towards an acoustic friendly and high-quality linguistic environment”, and more details can be found at ZonMw project website.

Pınar Ertürk has been awarded Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher Grant. She was invited by Emerging Auditory Research Lab led by Dr. Julie Arenberg at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School, for one academic year research visit starting from 8th Feb 2021.

Dr. Arenberg’s research focuses on improving speech perception abilities and listening experience of  hearing impaired pediatrics and adults by using a translational approach. Pınar will be working as a visiting researcher of Dr. Arenberg’s Lab on the purpose of conducting her Phd thesis research about speech on speech perception of hearing impaired individuals.

Our BME master’s student, Luke Meyer, has received a a PhD Fellowship from GSMS Kolffs Insitute. He will continue his work with Sam the Robot as a PhD, supervised by Deniz and Laura.
Congratulations Luke!