Page 47 - Jul2009

audiology. The award is named after Dr. James Jerger, currently a Distinguished- Scholar-In Research at the University of Texas at Dallas and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.
Dr. Gordon-Salant received a B.S. in Speech Pathology from SUNY Albany and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Audiology from Northwestern University. Following receipt of her Ph.D. she joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, where she has remained ever since and where she has developed and sustained an outstand- ing research career devoted to attaining a better understanding of the auditory perceptual problems experienced by older adults. Dr. Gordon-Salant, work- ing in collaboration with her long-time colleague and friend, Pete Fitzgibbons, was one of the first to clearly establish that older adults have great difficulty processing rapid sounds, including time-compressed or rapidly articulated speech. More importantly, she was able to demonstrate that such difficulties were age related and not just a simple consequence of peripheral hearing loss. The excellence of her programmatic research in these areas was recognized recently by the National Institute on Aging when her grant application received a prestigious MERIT award, adding an additional five years of National Institutes of Health support to her funded five-year application.
Dr. Gordon-Salant is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing
Association and mem-
ber of several scientific
societies including the
Acoustical Society of
America, the American
Academy of Audiology,
the American Auditory
Society, and the Associa-
tion for Research in
Otolaryngology. She
has served as Editor of
the Journal of Speech,
Language and Hearing
Research (Hearing Sec-
tion). Dr. Gordon-
Salant is the author or
editor of 10 book chap-
ters and 50 referred publications as well as editor, with R. Frisina, of The Aging Auditory System: Perceptual Character-iza- tion and Neural Bases of Presbycusis (Springer, 2009).
Scripps Oceanography Building Honors Fred Spiess
The existing Scripps Nierenberg Hall Annex (NTV) building at the University of California Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been rededicated as Spiess Hall in a ceremo- ny held in January 2009. The naming of the building recognizes the exceptional career and life of late, legendary Scripps oceanographer Fred Noel Spiess who was a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.
Spiess, who died in 2006, had been affiliated with Scripps Oceanography since 1952 and was a distinguished sci- entist and former director of Scripps. At the time of his death, Spiess was a professor emeritus of oceanography at the Scripps Marine Physical Laboratory and had a successful scien- tific career that spanned more than 50 years. During this period, he had an enormous impact on ocean sciences as a sea-going researcher who led an aver- age of two major oceanographic expe- ditions a year for more than 40 years. Spiess was widely known for his contri- butions to the development of innova- tive ocean technology. He was tireless in defining new ways to look at the deep ocean and seafloor. He designed and built instruments, took them to sea for deployment and led numerous expeditions to investigate the deepest
Fred Spiess and Spiess Hall
parts of the world’s oceans. He was also co-inventor of the one-of-a-kind research platform called FLIP, the Floating Instrument Platform, almost 50 years ago. FLIP, which is still in use today, is towed out to sea, then ballast tanks are flooded, causing a 90-degree horizontal-to-vertical flip. This vertical orientation creates a stable platform for conducting research at sea.
Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) was held 10-16 May 2009, at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno Nevada, home of the University of Nevada Reno and the Desert Research Institute. A total of 855 male and 708 female finalists from around the world competed for prizes within selected disciplines and for special awards from groups like the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). The students consisted of 186 Freshmen, 299 Sophomores, 494 Juniors, and 584 Seniors, and they were evaluated by 800- 1000 judges organized into groups of 3 or more that took responsibility for the various disciplines. The largest number of projects were associated with Medicine and Health (144) followed by Engineering: Electrical (138), Energy and Transportation (120), and a tie for (110) in the disciplines of Environmental Management and Physics and Astronomy.
Judges W. Patrick Arnott, Katherine McCall, and Timothy Darling represented ASA. The judges often participate in local science fairs
Sandra Gordon-Salant
46 Acoustics Today, July 2009