| Dr. David Purcell is the Principal Investigator of the SAFER Lab. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto specializing in otoacoustic emissions and his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Waterloo. After graduate school, he had postdoctoral training at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto specializing in auditory evoked potentials and the auditory steady-state response. Subsequently, he was a Research Associate with Queen's University in Kingston where he developed a system to study the role of auditory feedback during talking by manipulating vowel formants in real-time. Now an Associate Professor at Western in the School of Communication Sciences & Disorders and at the National Centre for Audiology, he has continued to study mechanisms of auditory feedback during speech production, the role of the olivocochlear efferent system using otoacoustic emissions, and measurement of brain activity elicited by vowel formants. He measures the brain's response to speech using envelope following responses for both basic research and validation of hearing aids in young children. |
| Maaike Van Eeckhoutte is a post doctoral fellow at the National Centre for Audiology. She works with Susan Scollie and David Purcell on speech evoked EFRs for hearing aid validation as well as the Desired Sensation Level (DSL) hearing aid fitting protocol.
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| Max Tran-Luong is a MSc student in the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences program. He is working on inhibition of otoacoustic emissions in children with supervisor Dr Prudence Allen. Dr. Purcell is advising about the otoacoustic emissions.
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| Negar Ahzan is a MSc student in the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences program. Her work is on objective measures of temporal processing.
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| Matt Urichuk is a student in the combined clinical Audiology and PhD program in the Hearing Science field. His work includes stimulus calibration methods and evoked potentials.
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| Monisha Basu was an NSERC USRA student from the School of Health Studies (the 2018 Gold Medal winner!) doing a summer project on speech evoked potentials. She is now in medical school at University of Toronto.
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| Caitlin Coughler is a combined clinical SLP and PhD student in the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences program. Her work includes the role of auditory feedback in speech production of children with DLD. She is co-supervised with Dr. Janis Cardy.
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| Dr. Viji Easwar completed her PhD and second post doctoral fellow with us. She continues her research on objective outcome measures of children with hearing loss who wear hearing aids and/or use cochlear implants in Communication Sciences and Disorders at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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| Adrienne Harrison is a student in the combined clinical Audiology and PhD program in the Hearing Science field. Her work involves auditory evoked potentials for hearing assessment.
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| Dr. Takashi Mitsuya (Email) was a post doctoral fellow studying speech motor control and speech production representation, using the real-time auditory feedback perturbation paradigm. He received his Ph.D. at Queen's University and did further research at University of Washington.
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| Linh Le Truc Nguyen completed her combined clinical Audiology and PhD program in the Hearing Science field. Her work investigated the role of auditory feedback during aided speech production. Previously, Linh was an MSc student investigating the role of auditory feedback in Vietnamese and English speakers. She is now a practicing audiologist with research interests. |
| Emma Bridgwater was an MSc student in the Hearing Science field and investigated the Envelope Following Response elicited by speech stimuli. Her work included the effect of consonant context and source localization. She is now attending medical school. |
| Dr. Sriram Boothalingam (Email: boothalingam@wisc.edu) completed his PhD in the SAFER Lab. Here's his description of his work:
While in the SAFER lab I worked under the supervision of Dr. David Purcell and Dr. Susan Scollie towards understanding the influence of the medial olivocochlear system (MOC) on cochlear activity using otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). I also collaborated with Dr. Ewan Macpherson, Dr. Prudence Allen and Dr. Chris Allan to study binaural MOC functioning and sound localization abilities in children with auditory processing disorder (APD) to delineate physiological mechanisms that may contribute to speech-in-noise problems that characterizes APD.
After continuing research on the MOC in Dr. Sumit Dhar's lab at Northwestern University as a post doctoral fellow, Sriram became an Assistant Professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sriram can be reached here.
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| Dr. Viji Easwar completed her PhD in the SAFER Lab. Here's her description of her work: My research focused on using electrophysiological methods to measure hearing aid benefit in infants who wear hearing aids. In collaboration with the Child Amplification Laboratory, we developed a stimulus paradigm that uses
a string of naturally spoken phonemes (/u/, /a/, /i/, /s/, /∫/) and
measures envelope following responses elicited by the individual phonemes.
Preliminary evaluation of the paradigm in adults suggests sensitivity to
changes in audibility in clinically feasible test times.
Subsequently, I was a post doctoral research fellow in Archie�s Cochlear
Implant Laboratory, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto.
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| Laura Beamish was a MSc Neuroscience student investigating the role of neural voice encoding in the use of auditory feedback during speech production. |
| Michaela Holmes was a MSc Neuroscience student investigating whether children with Specific Language Impairment may make different use of auditory feedback in speech production. She subsequently attended medical school. |
| Gaby Lesniak was a research assistant for the SAFER Lab and ran many of our experiments. She completed her Masters degree in Audiology. |
| Anders Tornvig Christensen was a visiting masters student from Denmark. He completed a project on source separation with the distortion product otoacoustic emission. |
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SAFERlab and friends at the start of term in fall 2010. From left, back row: David, Gaby, Jeff, Sriram; front row: Bonnie, Jong Min, Michaela, Viji.
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| Dr. Jong Min Choi (Email: leson[at]nca.uwo.ca) was a post doctoral fellow in the SAFER Lab. He completed his PhD at Seoul National University. His work here was with the auditory steady state response. |
| Ty Berry was improving our formant tracking method for our speech experiment. He also worked on real-time DPOAE estimation. Ty has completed his degree in electrical engineering. |
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SAFERlab at the end of term in spring 2010. From left, Bonnie, Jong Min, Marco, Julie-Anne, Gaby, and David.
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| Julie-Anne Coyne was studying the envelope following response to speech. She completed her Masters degree in audiology here at UWO. |
| Marco Coletta was studying bone conduction and the auditory steady state response. He completed his Masters degree in audiology here at UWO. |
| Bonnie Lampe was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab and ran most of our experiments. She completed her Masters degree in audiology here at UWO. |
| Mike Metel was working on signal processing methods for tracking real-time changes in distortion product otoacoustic emissions and the auditory steady state response. He completed his degree in electrical engineering here at UWO. |
| Samidha Joglekar was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab. She has completed her Masters degree in audiology and was investigating the role of auditory feedback during speech production. |
| Lauren Vannus was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab. She was also completing her Masters degree in audiology and was investigating the role of auditory feedback during speech production. |
| Lindsay Gibson was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab. She is completing her undergraduate degree in Health Sciences at UWO. In the lab, she worked on speech and electrophysiology projects. |
| Emily Barrett was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab. She has completed her Masters degree in speech language pathology at the University of Toronto. In the lab, she investigated the role of auditory feedback during speech production. |
| Blake Butler was a Masters student in the Health & Rehabilitation Sciences Graduate Program. He completed his PhD at McMaster University and is now a faculty member at Western. He investigated the olivocochlear efferent system using otoacoustic emissions (the neural connections between ears). We have a publication together with Tracy that appeared in the fall of 2008. |
| Tracy Saunders was a research assistant in the SAFER Lab. She has completed her Masters degree in audiology. She also worked on speech and electrophysiology projects. We have a publication together with Blake that appeared in the fall of 2008. |
