Carol Gorham
Human Subjects Research Coordinator

Carol Gorham manages the NIH P01 "Neuroplasticity in Auditory Aging" project in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.  Her responsibilities include budget, ensuring adherence to requirements for working with human subjects and managing the scheduling, recruitment and payment of participants. She has worked at UMD for the past 18 years, ten of which has been spent in grant management, and graduated from UMD in 1979. 

Katie Brow, Au.D., CCC-A
Research Audiologist, Projects 2 and 3

Katie Brow is a research audiologist working on the NIH Funded Program Grant "Neuroplasticity in Auditory Aging" in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. She conducts initial assessments to determine participants’ eligibility for Project 2 and Project 3 and tracks their progress throughout the study. Her background is in clinical audiology. Through her experience, she became interested in more effective treatment options for hearing impaired patients. She has worked in ear, nose and throat clinics and private audiology practices. She completed her Doctor of Audiology at the University of Florida, Master’s in Communication Disorders-Audiology at the University of Minnesota and Bachelor’s in Speech and Hearing Science with a minor in Psychology at The University of Iowa. 

Ed Smith, Ph.D.
Singal Processing Engineer, Project 2

Dr. Ed Smith is the signal processing engineer for the Neuroplasticity in Auditory Aging research project.  Dr. Smith has been instrumental in developing all of the software that runs the behavioral experiments to assess speech understanding in difficult listening conditions. Further, he developed the computer programs to facilitate preliminary data reduction of the results obtained from each participant in each testing or training session.  Dr. Smith also works with the university computing services to assure transfer of all anonymized data to a secure server for later analysis by the researchers and greater research community. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Arizona State University, MS in Computer Science at Southwest Texas State University, and his BS in Computer Science at the University of Nebraska.

Ciaran Stone
MEG Manager

Ciaran Stone has been the Magnetoencephalography (MEG) lab manager at UMD since January 2021. He implements the upkeep and maintenance of the MEG system, and trains new MEG users to conduct experiments. Ciaran completed his BA in Linguistics in December 2022, and hopes to begin graduate study in cognitive science of language in August 2023.