Laurel Carney

My career has focused on computational modeling and physiological studies of the early stages in the auditory system, from the inner ear up through the midbrain. Here at Eriksholm, I’m applying our physiological models, which have been developed for both healthy ears and ears with hearing loss, to problems related to understanding speech. Ideally, we’d like to be able to predict speech intelligibility (i.e. how well one understands the words in a speech test, or in a conversation) for individual listeners, in quiet and in noisy backgrounds.

As an undergraduate (age 18), I took a volunteer position working with my academic advisor, Professor William Peake, and I was hooked on studying hearing from that point on.

I’m motivated by curiosity about how the ear and the brain solve the difficult problem of hearing complex sounds in complex environments. I also want to better understand how even mild hearing loss makes this problem so much more difficult.

I’d like to play a role in translating some of the information we’ve gathered over decades of physiological experiments and computational modeling into better hearing aids.

Hard to say – I’ve been around a long time! There’ve been numerous advances in auditory science over the decades, but I think of them as steps forward that build on each other, rather than as ‘breakthroughs.’

I hope that we can better understand how the healthy auditory system naturally controls the sensitivity of the cochlear over time, depending on the recent and current sound environment, and how this sensitivity control changes with hearing loss. Then we may be able to include this knowledge in hearing aids.