Sandra Gordon-Salant, Ph.D.
Lead Investigator, Project 2

Sandra Gordon-Salant, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences and serves as the Principal Investigator of the Neuroplasticity in Auditory Aging grant, supported by the National Institute on Aging,.  Her research interests include the effects of aging and hearing loss on auditory processes, as well as signal enhancement devices for hearing-impaired listeners.  She has published over 100 articles and book chapters, primarily on the topic of age-related hearing loss and speech understanding problems of older people.  She is the senior editor of the book, The Aging Auditory System.  Dr. Gordon-Salant is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and of the Acoustical Society of America.  She received the prestigious James Jerger Career Award for Research in Audiology from the American Academy of Audiology in 2009 and the Al Kawana Award for lifetime achievement in publications from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2013.  Dr. Gordon-Salant also received the Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (2017) and the award of Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland (2017-2018).  Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health since 1986.   

Samira Anderson, Au.D., Ph.D.
Co-Lead, Project 2
Co-Investigator, Project 3

Dr. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on discovering the source of hearing difficulties experienced by older listeners and to determine the most effective treatment strategies for improving communication. Because the traditional audiogram often fails to predict real-world listening performance, she hasincorporated objective tests that measure how the brain responds to natural speech. Samira is a co-principal investigator on the NIH-funded Program Project Grant entitled, Neuroplasticity and Auditory Aging.

Jonathan Simon, Ph.D. 
Lead Investigator, Project 3

Jonathan Simon is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, holding faculty positions in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Department of Biology, and the Institute for Systems Research. He is co-director of the KIT-Maryland Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Center, and of the Computational Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory. His main expertise is in applied and theoretical neuroscience, with emphasis on auditory neuroscience. His primary research field is the neural foundations of speech processing and perception (especially for degraded speech), including the role of auditory attention and the effects of aging. He holds a bachelors in physics (Princeton University), a doctorate in physics (University of California, Santa Barbara), and had postdoctoral training in theoretical general relativity (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and University of Maryland, College Park) before embracing the field of neuroscience.

Matthew Goupell, Ph.D.
Co-Investigator, Project 2

Dr. Goupell is a Professor in the Dept. of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland. His research focus is cochlear implants, binaural processing, and aging.  He is collaborating with the Hearing Research Lab on studies of age-related changes in auditory processing among individuals who wear cochlear implants. He is a co-investigator on the NIH-funded Program Project Grant entitled, "Neuroplasticity and Auditory Aging".

Stefanie Kuchinsky, Ph.D.
Co-Investigator, Project 3

Stefanie Kuchinsky, Ph.D. is a Research Investigator in the Audiology and Speech Pathology Center at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. She also holds faculty affiliations at the Uniformed Services University and at the University of Maryland. Her research examines how auditory, linguistic, and cognitive systems interact to support speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions. A major focus of her work is on using behavioral, pupillometry, and neural measures of listening effort to more comprehensively assess and remediate the challenges that listeners face. 

Patrick Kanold, Ph.D.
Co-Lead, Project 1

Dr. Kanold is a neuroscientist and engineer studying the auditory cortex. He is interested in how the brain computes information about the world and how this representation is shaped by experience. His lab combines and further develops in vivo and in vitro optical and electrophysiological methods, high throughput behavioral approaches, and computational analyses to study the circuits and mechanisms underlying auditory perception and plasticity.

Shihab Shamma, Ph.D.
Lead Investigator, Project 1

Shihab Shamma, Ph.D. has been a member of the University of Maryland faculty since 1984, when he started as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. He has been associated with the Institute for Systems Research since its inception in 1985, and received a joint appointment in 1990. He is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Dr. Shamma's research is primarily focused on studying the computational principles underlying the processing and recognition of complex sounds (speech and music) in the auditory system, and the relationship between auditory and visual processing.