Dorea Ruggles (’06) Wins NIH Research Award Posted on November 29th, 2010 by

Dorea Ruggles (’06) has received a Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dorea is currently in the Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. program at Boston University.

Dorea in the Binaural Hearing Lab at Boston University


She writes, “The research I submitted deals with normal hearing adults and auditory attention. Auditory attention is what people do when they hear several concurrent sounds but need to pay attention to just one. It requires separating the sounds into distinct objects (like visual objects) and selecting an object to pay attention to. There are a lot of cues in sound and environment that make this possible, but there are also a lot of ways for it to go wrong (think about a cocktail party, where it’s hard to separate one voice from all the others). My research deals with normal hearing people and how well they can pay attention to auditory objects based only on where they are located in space (choosing one voice at the party based only on where it’s located). We find that there are large individual differences in how well people can do this, and that those differences are related to how well an individual encodes the fine structure of sound, both behaviorally and physiologically.

“One fun new twist to my research is that I’m starting to work with EEG measures of how sound is represented in the brainstem, where many of the environmental cues in sound are extracted and processed. This is making use of all of my E&M and math training from GAC, as well as all the signal processing I’ve been picking up in grad school.”

The objective of NIH-supported Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards programs is to help ensure that a diverse pool of highly trained scientists are available in adequate numbers and in appropriate research areas to address the Nation’s biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research needs. Detailed information about the Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Awards can be found at the NIH website.

Dorea says, “It’s really a fantastic award and hard to get (especially compared to the NSF fellowship I had before), so my adviser and I are feeling pretty giddy just now. We’re also putting finishing touches on two different papers that we think will make a splash, and I’m giving my first international invited talk in Cancun in two weeks! Things are going very well.”

Indeed, they are. Congratulations, Dorea!

 

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