Page 26 - Volume 12, Issue 2 - Spring 2012

Ruth Litovsky is a Professor of Communicative Disorders and Surgery/Division of Otolaryngology. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 in Developmental Psychology, and post-doctoral training in auditory neurophysiology and psychoacoustics. She currently directs the Binaural Hearing and Speech Laboratory at the Waisman Center and the Doctorate in Audiology Program. Professor Litovsky has been an active researcher in the field of hearing science for 25 years. She has been an Associate Editor for the Psychological and Physiological Acoustics sec- tion of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) for six years, and has served on the technical committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (P&P). She is on the executive council of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, recently appointed as Associate Editor of the Journal for Research in Otolaryngology, and chaired the most recent international scientific meeting in the field of cochlear implants, the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses. Dr. Litovsky serves on numerous peer-review panels for government funded research, steering committees, forums and panels. She fre- quently gives public lectures on hearing, acoustics, deafness and development. Litovsky’s research focuses on binaural hearing, covering the lifespan of humans to include infants and elderly adults, with populations of normal-hearing persons and those who are deaf and use cochlear implants. At the heart of her research questions is the issue of bilateral cochlear implants. In adults, the research ques- tions focus on the ability of people with onset of deafness in childhood vs. adult- hood to integrate information from the two ears with fidelity and precision, and the extent to which functional outcomes such as sound localization and speech understanding in complex environments is similar in these individuals compared with normal hearing listeners. This research program has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health–National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH-NIDCD) since 1995.
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