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Code of Conduct

ARO MidWinter Meeting attendees must attest to and agree to follow the Code of Conduct below:

 

1. Code of Conduct

The Association for Research in Otolaryngology (“ARO”) is dedicated to providing a safe and productive experience for all participants and attendees at all official ARO events regardless of sex, race, color, national origin, religion, age, physical or mental disability, perceived disability, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by federal or pertinent state laws.  ARO does not tolerate discrimination or any form of harassment and is committed to enforcing this Code of Conduct (the “Code”) at its MidWinter Meeting or at any other ARO event.  As a professional society, ARO is committed to providing an atmosphere that encourages the free expression and exchange of scientific and educational ideas.  Furthermore, ARO upholds the philosophy of equal opportunity for and treatment of all meeting participants and staff in any venue.

2.   Scope of Code
ARO requires compliance with the Code by all meeting participants, staff, guests, and vendors at all official ARO events, including the annual meeting, committee meetings or other activities that are expressly sponsored or promoted by ARO, whether held in public or private facilities. This policy is an expression of ARO’s values and commitment to a safe and productive experience for all participants and attendees at its official events.  This policy is not an acknowledgement, admission, or description of ARO’s legal obligations with respect to any of the subject matters addressed herein, nor does it create any such legal obligations.

3.   Harassment Defined
Harassment includes verbal, physical, and visual conduct that creates an intimidating, offensive, or hostile environment.  Harassing conduct can take many forms and includes, but is not limited to, the following:  slurs, epithets, derogatory comments, insults, degrading or obscene words, jokes, demeaning statements, offensive gestures, or displaying derogatory or demeaning pictures, drawings, or cartoons based upon an individual’s sex, race, color, national origin, religion, age, physical  or mental disability, perceived disability, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by federal or pertinent state laws or local ordinances.

Sexually harassing conduct in particular includes all of these prohibited actions, as well as other unwelcome conduct that is sexual in nature, such as unwanted sexual advances; lewd propositions or innuendos; leering; making sexual gestures; making sexually suggestive or graphic comments or engaging in inappropriate sexually-oriented conversation; displaying sexually suggestive objects, graphics, pictures, or posters, whether physically  or over the Internet; making or using derogatory comments, epithets, slurs or jokes; the sexual touching or display of one’s own body; or unwanted physical touching or assault, as well as impeding or blocking movements.

Sexually harassing conduct can be by a person of either the same or opposite sex.  It is a violation of this policy for males to sexually harass females or other males, and for females to sexually harass males or other females.  Conduct that begins as consensual in nature may become harassment if one party withdraws his or her consent.  Sexual or other harassment prohibited by this policy is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

The above list of prohibited behaviors is not a complete rendering of what may be deemed sexual or other harassment prohibited by this policy.  It is impossible to define every action or word that could be interpreted as harassment.  However, ARO has a “zero tolerance” policy toward discrimination and all forms of harassment.  ARO reserves the right to discipline meeting participants who engage in any inappropriate conduct, even if it is not specifically referred to or defined in this Code or is not legally actionable as sexual or any other form of harassment.

4.   Prohibited Conduct
Prohibited conduct at ARO meetings includes, but is not limited to:

  1. harassment based on sex, race, color, personal appearance, national origin, religion, age, physical disability, mental disability, perceived disability, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by federal or pertinent state laws;
  2. demeaning comments or harassment about a person’s professional status, qualifications, or affiliations;
  3. sexual harassment, as defined in Section 3;
  4. abusive conduct that has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with another person’s ability to benefit from and enjoy or participate in the meeting, including social events related to the meeting and sponsored by ARO;
  5. undue or excessive interruption of any event, speaker, or session; and
  6. violence or threats of violence.

5.   Reporting an Incident
Meeting participants or other individuals who witness or experience inappropriate conduct at an ARO meeting or other official ARO event, including but not limited to the prohibited conduct described above, should report such conduct immediately to the Executive Director of ARO, Allison Jevens at ajevens@parthenonmgmt.com  or (615) 432-0100.  If the individual is uncomfortable reporting the conduct to the Executive Director of ARO for any reason, the individual may report the conduct to the President & CEO of Parthenon Management Group, Sarah Timm at stimm@parthenonmgmt.com or (615) 324-2374.  Any individual reporting such conduct is not required or expected to discuss the concern with the alleged offender. Anyone experiencing or witnessing behavior at an ARO event that is an immediate or serious threat to the safety of those present, or to the public, is advised to locate a house phone and ask for security, or to otherwise contact the authorities for protection.

ARO cannot address claimed inappropriate conduct or harassment unless the claims are brought to the attention of ARO leadership.  Meeting participants are encouraged to report any incidents of perceived violations of this policy as quickly as they can or otherwise feel safe doing.

ARO is committed to taking reasonable steps to prevent harassment and other prohibited conduct at its meetings and will make reasonable efforts to promptly and completely address and correct any prohibited conduct that may occur at an official ARO event.  ARO will keep any investigation of an alleged violation of this policy as confidential as possible.
ARO can only investigate situations that arise at ARO meetings or other ARO-sponsored events.  If a meeting participant experiences inappropriate conduct or harassment at the participant’s own or another institution, at a place of work, at a research facility, or online but not via ARO-sponsored channels that individual should contact the appropriate person or department responsible for such things at that particular institution, facility or medium.

6.   Investigation
ARO will promptly and impartially investigate the facts and circumstances of any claim of inappropriate conduct or harassment under this policy.  ARO will make every effort to keep the reporting individual’s concerns confidential and will not deliberately share personal information, other than as necessary to carry out the purpose of investigation. While complete confidentiality cannot be guaranteed, ARO will keep the investigation and its findings as confidential as possible under the circumstances. During an investigation, ARO or a designated independent consultant subject to obligations of confidentiality, generally will do the following (as necessary) to make a determination as to appropriate action:

  • document the nature of the complaint;
  • interview the complainant;
  • conduct further interviews as necessary, such as with witnesses and, at an appropriate time, the alleged offender;
  • document ARO’s findings regarding the complaint;
  • document recommended follow-up actions and remedies, if warranted; and
  • inform the complainant of the basic nature of ARO’s findings.

ARO will attempt to investigate any complaint or report of a violation of this policy in a prompt and timely manner.  Upon completion of the investigation, ARO will take appropriate corrective measures against any person who has engaged in conduct prohibited by this policy, if ARO determines such measures are necessary.  Such remedial action may include, but is not limited to, the items listed below in Section 7.

7.   Disciplinary Action
If ARO determines that an individual has engaged in prohibited conduct, ARO shall determine the appropriate action to be taken, which may include, but is not limited to:

  • private reprimand;
  • removal from the Meeting without warning or refund;
  • implementation of conditions upon attendance at future ARO Meetings;
  • restriction from attendance at future ARO Meetings; or
  • expulsion from ARO.

ARO may, but is not required to, report any incident to proper authorities, including but not limited to law enforcement.  ARO will do so if, in its sole discretion, such reporting is advisable or necessary.  If ARO determines that an individual has engaged in prohibited conduct at an ARO meeting, and such individual is an ARO member, ARO may take disciplinary measures by removing such individual from ARO membership.  Nothing in this policy shall restrict or discourage any individual who experiences or is the target of conduct prohibited by this policy from reporting such conduct to the authorities, to the extent he or she deems such a report advisable or necessary.

8.   Retaliation Is Not Tolerated
Retaliation for complaints of inappropriate conduct or harassment are also considered harassment and will not be tolerated.  Retaliatory behavior in connection with ARO meetings will be investigated in a similar manner to initial complaints.

9. Photographing and/or Recording Presentations During the Mid-winter Meeting 
Photographing or recording material presented in a podium session, symposium or poster session is only allowed for the purposes of increased comprehension by meeting attendees who may have difficulty understanding the speaker during the initial presentation.  Any distribution or reproduction of imagery created during any scientific presentation at the ARO Mid-winter Meeting, without the consent of the presenter, is prohibited and represents a violation of ARO’s expectation of ethical conduct.  Photographing a speaker before, during or after a session is not allowed without explicit permission from the speaker.

Acceptable Use of Social Media - ARO encourages the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and blogging sites to engage our community in the Mid-winter Meeting.  We encourage attendees to post or tweet highlights about the meeting, discuss outstanding speakers, panels and posters and offer recommendations on which panels and posters to attend. If you wish to post a photograph of a speaker in the context of their presentation, please obtain their permission. 

When sharing information, we request you refrain from including photographed or recorded material or paraphrased content presented in a scientific presentation. Data shared at ARO belongs to the presenter and should not be shared on social media by a meeting participant.  Tweeting/posting unpublished data from another lab represents a violation of ARO’s expectation of ethical conduct and would discourage members from presenting unpublished work.

Hearing loss can significantly disrupt the ability of children to become mainstreamed in educational environments that emphasize spoken language as a primary means of communication. Similarly, adults who lose their hearing after communicating using spoken language have numerous challenges understanding speech and integrating into social situations. These challenges are particularly significant in noisy situations, where multiple sound sources often arrive at the ears from various directions. Intervention with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants (CIs) has proven to be highly successful for restoring some aspects of communication, including speech understanding and language acquisition. However, there is also typically a notable gap in outcomes relative to normal-hearing listeners. Importantly, auditory abilities operate in the context of how hearing integrates with other senses. Notably, the visual system is tightly couples to the auditory system. Vision is known to impact auditory perception and neural mechanisms in vision and audition are tightly coupled, thus, in order to understand how we hear and how CIs affect auditory perception we must consider the integrative effects across these senses.

We start with Rebecca Alexander, a compelling public speaker who has been living with Usher’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder found in tens of thousands of people, causing both deafness and blindness in humans. Ms. Alexander will be introduced by Dr. Jeffrey Holt, who studies gene therapy strategies for hearing restoration. The symposium then highlights the work of scientists working across these areas. Here we integrate psychophysics, clinical research, and biological approaches, aiming to gain a coherent understanding of how we might ultimately improve outcomes in patients. Drs. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are new to the ARO community, and will discuss neurobiology of the visual system as it relates to visual prostheses. Dr. Jennifer Groh’s work will then discuss multi-sensory processing and how it is that vision helps us hear. Having set the stage for thinking about the role of vision in a multisensory auditory world, we will hear from experts in the area of cochlear implants. Dr. René H Gifford will discuss recent work on electric-acoustic integration in children and adults, and Dr. Sharon Cushing will discuss her work as a clinician on 3-D auditory and vestibular effects. Dr. Matthew Winn will talk about cognitive load and listening effort using pupillometry, and we will end with Dr. Rob Shepherd’s discussion of current work and future possibilities involving biological treatments and neural prostheses. Together, these presentations are designed to provide a broad and interdisciplinary view of the impact of sensory restoration in hearing, vision and balance, and the potential for future approaches for improving the lives of patients.

Kirupa Suthakar, PhD - Dr Kirupa Suthakar is a postdoctoral fellow at NIH/NIDCD, having formerly trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and doctoral student at Garvan Institute of Medical Research/UNSW Australia.  Kirupa's interest in the mind and particular fascination by how we are able to perceive the world around us led her to pursue a research career in auditory neuroscience.  To date, Kirupa's research has broadly focused on neurons within the auditory efferent circuit, which allow the brain to modulate incoming sound signals at the ear.  Kirupa is active member of the spARO community, serving as the Chair Elect for 2021.

 

 

I began studying the vestibular system during my dissertation research at the Università di Pavia with Professors Ivo Prigioni and GianCarlo Russo. I had two postdoctoral fellowships, first at the University of Rochester with Professor Christopher Holt and then at the University of Illinois at Chicago with Professors Jonathan Art and Jay Goldberg.

My research focuses on characterizing the biophysics of synaptic transmission between hair cells and primary afferents in the vestibular system. For many years an outstanding question in vestibular physiology was how the transduction current in the type I hair cell was sufficient, in the face of large conductances on at rest, to depolarize it to potentials necessary for conventional synaptic transmission with its unique afferent calyx.

In collaboration with Dr. Art, I overcame the technical challenges of simultaneously recording from type I hair cells and their enveloping calyx afferent to investigate this question. I was able to show that with depolarization of either hair cell or afferent, potassium ions accumulating in the cleft depolarize the synaptic partner. Conclusions from these studies are that due to the extended apposition between type I hair cell and its afferent, there are three modes of communication across the synapse. The slowest mode of transmission reflects the dynamic changes in potassium ion concentration in the cleft which follow the integral of the ongoing hair cell transduction current. The intermediate mode of transmission is indirectly a result of this potassium elevation which serves as the mechanism by which the hair cell potential is depolarized to levels necessary for calcium influx and the vesicle fusion typical of glutamatergic quanta. This increase in potassium concentration also depolarizes the afferent to potentials that allow the quantal EPSPs to trigger action potentials. The third and most rapid mode of transmission like the slow mode of transmission is bidirectional, and a current flowing out of either hair cell or afferent into the synaptic cleft will divide between a fraction flowing out into the bath, and a fraction flowing across the cleft into its synaptic partner.

The technical achievement of the dual electrode approach has enabled us to identify new facets of vestibular end organ synaptic physiology that in turn raise new questions and challenges for our field. I look forward with great excitement to the next chapter in my scientific story.

 

Charles C. Della Santina, PhD MD is a Professor of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he directs the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Implant Center and the Johns Hopkins Vestibular NeuroEngineering Laboratory.

As a practicing neurotologic surgeon, Dr. Della Santina specializes in treatment of middle ear, inner ear and auditory/vestibular nerve disorders. His clinical interests include restoration of hearing via cochlear implantation and management of patients who suffer from vestibular disorders, with a particular focus on helping individuals disabled by chronic postural instability and unsteady vision after bilateral loss of vestibular sensation. His laboratory’s research centers on basic and applied research supporting development of vestibular implants, which are medical devices intended to partially restore inner ear sensation of head movement. In addition to that work, his >90 publications include studies characterizing inner ear physiology and anatomy; describing novel clinical tests of vestibular function; and clarifying the effects of cochlear implantation, vestibular implantation, superior canal dehiscence syndrome and intratympanic gentamicin therapy on the inner ear and central nervous system.  Dr. Della Santina is also the founder and CEO/Chief Scientific Officer of Labyrinth Devices LLC, a company dedicated to bringing novel vestibular testing and implant technology into routine clinical care.

Andrew Griffith received his MD and PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1992. He completed his general surgery internship and a residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Michigan in 1998. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Human Genetics as part of his training at the University of Michigan. In 1998, he joined the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) in the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). He served as a senior investigator, the chief of the Molecular Biology and Genetics Section, the chief of the Otolaryngology Branch, and the director of the DIR, as well as the deputy director for Intramural Clinical Research across the NIH Intramural Research Program. His research program identifies and characterizes molecular and cellular mechanisms of normal and disordered hearing and balance in humans and mouse models. Two primary interests of his program have been hearing loss associated with enlargement of the vestibular aqueduct, and the function of TMC genes and proteins. The latter work lead to the discovery that the deafness gene product TMC1 is a component of the hair cell sensory transduction channel. Since July of 2020, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean of Research and a Professor of Otolaryngology and Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

Gwenaëlle S. G. Géléoc obtained a PhD in Sensory Neurobiology from the University of Sciences in Montpellier (France) in 1996. She performed part of her PhD training at the University of Sussex, UK where she characterized sensory transduction in vestibular hair cells and a performed a comparative study between vestibular and cochlear hair cells. Gwenaelle continued her training as an electrophysiologist at University College London studying outer hair cell motility and at Harvard Medical School studying modulation of mechanotransduction in vestibular hair cells. As an independent investigator at the University of Virginia, she expanded this work and characterized the developmental acquisition of sensory transduction in mouse vestibular hair cells, the developmental acquisition of voltage-sensitive conductances in vestibular hair cells and the tonotopic gradient in the acquisition of sensory transduction in the mouse cochlea. This work along with quantitative spatio-temporal studies performed on several hair cell mechanotransduction candidates lead her to TMC1 and 2 and long-term collaborations with Andrew Griffith and Jeff Holt. Dr. Géléoc is currently Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology, at Boston Children’s Hospital where she continues to study molecular players involved in the development and function of hair cells of the inner ear and develops new therapies for the treatment of deafness and balance, with a particular focus on Usher syndrome.

Jeff Holt earned a doctorate from the Department of Physiology at the University of Rochester in 1995 for his studies of inward rectifier potassium channels in saccular hair cells.  He went on to a post-doctoral position in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he characterized sensory transduction and adaptation in hair cells and developed a viral vector system to transfect cultured hair cells.  Dr. Holt’s first faculty position was in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Virginia.  In 2011 the lab moved to Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School.  Dr. Holt is currently a Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology and Neurology in the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center.  Dr. Holt and his team have been studying sensory transduction in auditory and vestibular hair cells over the past 20 years, with particular focus on TMC1 and TMC2 over the past 12 years.  This work lead to the discovery that TMC1 forms the hair cell transduction channel.  His work also focuses on development gene therapy strategies for genetic hearing loss.​