Dr. Elizabeth Stegemöller, music therapist and neuroscientist, joined Iowa State University in 2013 and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and the Director of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. Dr. Stegemöller’s research focus is to understand the neurophysiology associated with the therapeutic effect of music in persons with Parkinson’s disease (PD). She has completed multiple funded projects examining the effects of singing in persons with PD and has over 60 publications in her career. In addition, Dr. Stegemöller offers several outreach programs for persons with PD, including weekly singing, dance, and boxing groups, as well as, yearly events such as the PD Singing Festival. Dr. Stegemöller is very passionate about her work and hopes that through her research and outreach efforts, she can contribute to the development of new and innovative therapies involving music for persons with PD.

Frank Russo is a Full Professor of Psychology, NSERC-Sonova Senior Industrial Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, and Director of the Science of Music Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research in the SMART Lab investigates the neuro-cognitive, neuro-affective, and socio-biological aspects of music, speech, and hearing. Additionally, he is the Scientific Director of SingWell, a global network dedicated to singing and wellbeing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received over 10M CAD in lifetime funding. His contributions have earned him Fellowships at Massey College, the Canadian Society for Brain Behavior and Cognitive Science, and the Canadian Psychological Association.

View presentation slides here.

Gabrielle R. Merchant, Au.D., Ph.D., CCC-A is an audiologist and hearing scientist and the Director of the Translational Auditory Physiology and Perception Laboratory at Boys Town National Research Hospital. She earned her B.A. from Smith College, her Ph.D. from the Harvard-MIT Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program, and her Au.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her translational hearing research focuses on auditory mechanics, auditory perception, and advancing evidence-based practice through improved clinical diagnostic tools. Her laboratory has a particular focus on pediatrics, conductive hearing loss, and wideband acoustic immittance. 

View presentation slides here.

Dr. John J Rosowski is a Professor Emeritus of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery at the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a semi-retired Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) in Boston MA. His PhD, received in 1979, is in Physiology from the University of Pennsylvania, with Dr. James C Saunders as his supervisor. A three-year post-doctoral fellowship in Physiologic Acoustics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge MA followed, under the supervision of Professor Bill Peake. An appointment as Research Scientist at MIT in 1983 was followed by a switch to Associate Profess of Otology and Laryngology at HMS and the MEEI in 1993. He has remained with the HMS and MEEI since.

The central theme of Dr. Rosowski’s research career has been the relationship between the structure of external and middle ear systems within humans and other vertebrates and their physical and physiological function. His work includes acoustical, mechanical and physiological measurements in the middle ears of lizards, birds, common laboratory mammals, and a few more exotic mammals, including lions, and tigers. This interest in how middle-ear form affects its function has been generalized to include speculations about how the transition of the ossicles from the jaw of early mammal-like reptiles to the mammalian middle ear influenced hearing function, and, in-consort with his clinical colleagues at the MEEI, numerous studies of how common pathologies and surgical reconstructions affect human middle-ear function.

Dr. Rosowski has applied innovative tools in his studies. These include measurements of sound pressures within the inner ear, wide-band acoustic immittance, laser-Doppler vibrometry, laser-holography and optical-coherence tomography. In recent years he has worked with students and young colleagues to better understand the response of the human and animal ears to bone-conducted stimuli, especially at high frequencies.

In performing his work Dr. Rosowski has depended on and greatly benefitted from the efforts of his many colleagues (Bill Peake ScD, Saumil Merchant MD, Tom Weiss ScD, Michael Ravicz MS, Heidi Nakajima MD PhD, Sunil Puria PhD, Jeffry Tao Cheng PhD, Cosme Furlong PhD, Aaron Remenschneider MD MPH and others) and students and advisees (Susan Voss PhD, Greg Huang PhD, Jocelyn Songer PhD, Gabriel Merchant PhD, David Chhan MS, Peter Bowers PhD and many more).

Dr. Zalewski received his undergraduate degree from The Pennsylvania State University, his Masters degree in Audiology from The University of Maryland, and his Ph.D. in Audiology from Gallaudet University. He has served as a clinical research audiologist with the National Institutes on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2002, where his primary clinical responsibilities involve the investigation of the auditory and vestibular phenotypes of rare genetic diseases and syndromes. Chris has maintained a regular adjunct faculty appointment at the University of Maryland since 2001 and has past or recurring guest appointment lectures at Georgetown University, Gallaudet University, Towson University and with Walter Reed National Medical Center. He has been a member of the American Balance Society since its founding in 2008 and has served on the Board of Directors of the American Balance Society between 2013 and 2022, including that of President in 2021. Chris also served a three-year term on the Board of Director’s for the American Academy of Audiology 2016-2018. He received the Vestibular Disorders Association Vestibular Champion Award in 2018. His primary research interests are in vestibular physiology and balance disorders, with an emphasis on rotational testing, otolith function, and vestibular sensitivity measures. He is primary or co-author of many articles investigating the auditory and/or vestibular function of rare diseases and book chapters, including a textbook on rotational vestibular assessment. Finally, Dr. Zalewski also has a personal interest in the historical perspectives of medicine and, in particular, that of vestibular science.

*THIS SESSION WAS NOT RECORDED*

Kathleen E. Cullen is a Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center for Hearing and Balance, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering. She also holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Otolaryngology and heads the Neuroengineering group within the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Cullen’s research has significantly advanced our fundamental understanding of how the brain encodes and integrates self-motion information during our everyday activities. She founded and directs the Johns Hopkins’ Systems Neuroscience and Neuroengineering Laboratory (SNNL) which spans the interdisciplinary fields of neural engineering and neuroscience and uses the power of emerging computational and neurophysiological methodologies. The overarching focus of her research program is to understand how the brain creates neural representations of our self-motion to ensure the maintenance of balance and posture, as well as accurate perceptual stability during our everyday activities.

In addition to her research activities, Dr. Cullen has made extensive contributions to the broader academic community both nationally and internationally. She currently serves as the President of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement (NCM). During her tenure as Vice President and now President of NCM, Dr. Cullen successfully achieved gender parity in conference presentations, increasing the representation of women from 10% to 50% to align with the society's current composition. Dr. Cullen has also been an active member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which works with NASA to identify health risks in extended space flight. Dr. Cullen currently serves on the Steering Committees of the Whiting School of Engineering Senate, Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, and National Academies' Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space 2023-2032.

Dr. Cullen earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Chicago in 1991. To date, she has published over 160 papers in the fields of Neuroscience and Neuroengineering and is frequently invited to write reviews on the vestibular system (e.g., Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Trends in Neuroscience, Annual Reviews of Neuroscience). She has also served as a domain expert for well-known media sources (e.g. The Washington Post, Scientific American, CNN, PBS, Wall Street Journal, CTV news, National Public Radio (NPR)). In addition, Dr. Cullen has received awards for my research contributions including the Halpike-Nylen medal of the International Barany Society for "outstanding contributions to basic vestibular science", and Sarrazin Award Lectureship from the Canadian Physiological Society (CPS).

Dr Rubinstein received ScB/ScM degrees in Engineering at Brown University in 1981/83. He received an MD and PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Washington in 1987/88. He completed postdoctoral research training at MIT and residency in Otolaryngology in 1994 at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He completed a Neurotology fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1995 staying as Assistant then Associate Professor of Otolaryngology and Bioengineering. In 2003/04 he was the Boerhaave Professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is currently Virginia Merrill Bloedel Professor of Otolaryngology and Bioengineering and Director, Bloedel Hearing Research Center, University of Washington. He has been President of the American Auditory Society and the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. He is a member of the Collegium Otorhinolaryngologicum, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering as well as a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is president-elect of the Politzer Society, an international otologic research organization. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles in both clinical and basic science journals and has mentored 18 predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees in basic and translational research, as well as providing clinical training to a large number of otolaryngology residents and fellows. He maintains a busy surgical practice at both UW Medical Center and Seattle Childrens. His NIH funded laboratory studies models of, signal processing in and perception with cochlear implants, and is collaborating in the development of a vestibular implant.

After completing the doctorate in physiology from the University of California at Davis (John Horowitz, Tim Jones), Larry Hoffman joined the laboratory of Vicente Honrubia in the Department of Surgery/Head & Neck Surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine to investigate the morphologic substrates of dynamic response heterogeneity among vestibular primary afferent neurons. Upon establishing an independent laboratory at UCLA he began collaborating with Michael Paulin (University of Otago; Dunedin, New Zealand), taking a different approach to probing head movement coding and the role of spontaneous discharge in sensory information transmission and dynamical sensory coding. The laboratory’s focus on ribbon synapses in vestibular hair cells began with a spaceflight investigation in which plasticity in synaptic ribbon densities was found after a 2-week exposure to the microgravity environment of the International Space Station. Much of the lab’s current work is focused upon the physiologic and cellular substrates of vestibular function and hypofunction, including those associated with behavioral agility and hypofunction induced by ototoxins and genetic modification. This research provides a rich platform revealing novel insights into rehabilitation and neurocomputation.

Tomoko Makishima is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, on Galveston Island, Texas. She obtained her M.D. and Ph.D. at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, studying the molecular mechanism of apoptosis. She then completed residency training in Otolaryngology in Japan before coming to the NIDCD, NIH, as a postdoc in Dr. Andrew Griffith’s lab to study genetic hearing loss in humans and in mice models. She has been at UTMB since 2005 as a clinician-scientist splitting her efforts between patient care and research. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of hearing and balance disorders and uses a combination of molecular biology and auditory and vestibular behavioral analysis in humans and in mice models.

In recent years, her lab has been tackling various otolaryngologic sequelae of viral infections in collaboration with the Pathology Department and the high containment Galveston National Lab at UTMB. Currently her lab is working on characterizing hearing loss and balance dysfunction caused by Lassa virus in mice models as well as in human subjects through a collaboration with Jos University, Nigeria.

Dr. Tejbeer Kaur is an Indian immigrant and an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska. She obtained her PhD at the Southern Illinois University, Springfield, Illinois where she studied the role of inflammation and STAT transcription factors in cisplatin (cancer drug)-induced ototoxicity and hearing loss. She completed postdoctoral training at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. In the Kaur Lab, the research aims to understand the complex biology and interactions of immune cells and their effector molecules with the sensory cells in the cochlea of the inner ear and how these interactions influence hearing, hearing loss and sensory cell development, degeneration, repair, survival, and plasticity. Inner ear contains a resident population of macrophages (innate-immune cells). Importantly, sensorineural hearing loss due to ototoxic side effects of certain medications, noise trauma, infections or healthy aging is associated with inflammation and robust activation and increase in numbers of macrophages. However, the precise functions of macrophages and inflammation are unclear. Dr. Kaur’s early research demonstrated a critical role of macrophages in the survival of afferent neurons in the injured cochlea and identified a novel neuron-immune signaling axis, fractalkine signaling that regulate the spontaneous repair of ribbon synapses and long-term survival of neurons in the injured cochlea. Recently, she and her colleagues have delineated a new role for cochlear macrophages in ribbon synapse repair after noise-induced synaptopathy. Her ongoing work focuses on understanding the diversity and functions of macrophages and their effector molecules in normal and pathological ears and to develop novel immunotherapies to prevent and/or restore loss of hearing and sensory cells and to maximize hearing aids and cochlear implant technologies for treating sensorineural hearing loss.

Dr. Karina S. Cramer is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. She obtained her Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where she studied neuromuscular development. She completed postdoctoral training at MIT in visual system development, then shifted to auditory system development at the University of Washington. Her laboratory at UC Irvine investigates the developmental mechanisms that assemble auditory brainstem circuitry, particularly in regions that enable sound source localization. Her early research demonstrated roles for Eph family proteins in axon targeting and formation of tonotopy in auditory system development. She and her colleagues have identified new axon guidance roles for molecules in the apoptotic pathway. Her ongoing research also explores the functions of glial cells, including astrocytes, microglia, and oligodendrocytes, in the maturation of auditory brainstem circuitry.