Page 32 - Spring2020

Boys Town Acoustics Research
The initial growth phase of the research program ended in 1983, when Watson moved to Indiana University (Bloomington). By that time, there were 18 independent laboratories and impor- tant elements of the research program were in place.
Scope of the Research Program
Brookhouser’s initial proposal assumed that the seven labo- ratories would cover a wide range of disciplines, which is evident in a long history of contributions to neurochemis- try, molecular genetics, and biophysics at one extreme and education of deaf children and language development at the other. The emphasis in this review is on work in areas directly related to acoustics as evidenced by publications in JASA, but the existence of research efforts in these other areas certainly contributed to the success of the portions of the research program described here and to the impact of the research program as a whole.
Brookhouser himself made important contributions to aca- demic otolaryngology, but the BTNRH was not in a position to recruit many academically oriented physicians because it lacked the caseload and residency programs found in large academic medical centers. And although the research pro- gram was heavily focused on hearing for many years, it has recently expanded into language disorders, functional mag- netic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of neurobehavioral development, and related areas.
Translational Research
Most of the laboratory directors recruited in the initial years came from basic research backgrounds and continued to pursue work in those areas at the BTNRH. At that time, NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grant-review panels funded more basic research than clinically oriented research and there was less interest nationally in what is now called translational research that extends laboratory work to the clinic. That was a major goal of the BTNRH, however; so in that sense, we were ahead of the times. Despite the insti- tutional goal, it was difficult to bridge the gap between the research laboratories and the clinics, a problem confronted by many other research programs. Researchers and clinicians met to discuss interesting patients seen in the clinic, but there was little actual research collaboration. This changed in the early 1980s as a result of the recruitment of additional staff.
Turnover in the audiology clinic in 1981 resulted in recruit- ment of two recent graduates of the University of Iowa (Iowa City), Pat Stelmachowicz as coordinator of audiology and
Figure 3. Left to right: Walt Jesteadt, Mary Pat Moeller, Patrick Brookhouser, Pat Stelmachowicz, and Michael Gorga in the BTNRH lobby, 2012.
Michael Gorga as head of a human sensory physiology labo- ratory, with the responsibility for clinical evoked-potential testing as well as research. Stephen Neely joined the research program in 1982 as head of the communication engineering laboratory, the position initially held by Richard Lippmann. Neely had developed the first model of cochlear mechanics that included active elements. Donna Neff joined the research program in 1983. Mary Pat Moeller came to the BTNRH as a master’s level clinician in 1978 but became involved in research in the early 1980s and later received a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1994, she became direc- tor of our speech, language, and aural habilitation programs, where she provided strong research leadership for these clin- ical programs. This core group of Jesteadt, Stelmachowicz, Gorga, Neely, Neff, and Moeller remained at the BTNRH for their entire research careers and along with Douglas Keefe, a late arrival in 1995, formed the backbone of the hearing research program (see Figure 3).
Examples of Significant Research Contributions
The BTNRH research program has been broad from its incep- tion and has made important contributions in many areas. One example concerns contributions to the advent of universal newborn hearing screening in the 1990s (Brookhouser, 2002). Newborn hearing screen was made possible by the devel- opment of methodology and normative data for objective
32 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2020