Nina Kraus, PhD, is Professor of Neurobiology & Physiology, Otolaryngology, Hugh Knowles Chair, and the Director of the Auditory Neurosciences Laboratory at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University. Dr Kraus’s research includes the investigation of learning-associated brain plasticity throughout the lifetime in normal, expert (musicians), clinical populations (dyslexia; autism; hearing loss) and animal models. Dr. Kraus is known to be a pioneering thinker and innovator whose work bridges multiple disciplines. While some researchers consider 20 publications a career, Nina has that many just for 2013, and it’s only July!
Dr Kraus’s research is not only recognized by audiologists and scientists, but is known internationally by the general public thanks to reports on NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, NY Times and articles in National Geographic, Nature and of course, AudiologyOnline.
In this article, Nina gives us a glimpse of some the research from her auditory neuroscience laboratory related to speech understanding. Many of her observations relate to our everyday clinical findings, and may help explain why some patients do better than others in background noise.