Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences

Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently received a $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve outcomes for children with significant hearing loss by providing individualized, prescription-like programming for their cochlear implants.

For Dominique Herrington, MS, assistant manager of Rehab Services for the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences’ Pi Beta Phi Rehabilitation Institute, Thursdays are the best days to come to work.

In support of her research to understand and improve long-term outcomes of individuals with traumatic brain injury, Melissa Duff, PhD, associate professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences, was recently named a 2018 Distinguished Switzer Research Fellow by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

Anne Marie Tharpe, PhD, might not have become a worldwide authority on pediatric hearing loss if she hadn’t been looking for something to do during study hall in her high school years in Memphis. One day, she and a friend volunteered to work in a classroom with deaf children.

Surgeons face a delicate proposition when treating acoustic neuromas, benign tumors on the nerve that affect hearing and balance. Removing small tumors through surgery and radiation can cause complications such as the loss of hearing, when the tumors may not grow and impact quality of life for years. But not removing them can allow them to grow and be more difficult to remove and pose even greater risks.

Adult patients now have a convenient new option for hearing evaluations, hearing aid consultations and fittings and other services with the opening of a new audiology clinic in Green Hills.

Children with hearing loss who use remote microphone systems (RMS) at home have access to about 42 percent more words each day, providing a critical boost to vocabulary and language learning, a Vanderbilt study has found.