Wolfson’s new College Research Associate talks sound, software, and changing the status quo

What brought you to academia?

I've always been very interested in music. I wanted to be an opera singer when I was younger, I was classically trained, and have ended up in the much more stable profession of academia!

I studied Biomedical Engineering and Music Cognition at Northwestern University in Chicago. Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I was sitting in a psychoacoustics class where the professor was talking about how the ear basically transmits sound from pressure waves in the air into neural signals. She said that, like a piano, it takes different frequencies of sound and then it transmits them at different places along your cochlea, which is your inner ear, which is shaped a bit like a snail shell. It's this really elegant, really beautiful system. I sat in the back of the classroom and I realised that maybe there was some overlap between my two very strong but seemingly very disparate interests.

Why Wolfson?

I actually applied multiple times to Wolfson as a postdoc! The egalitarian nature is really core to the way that the College functions, and I wanted to be a part of that. Chipping away at some of the hierarchical structures of society is core to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) generally, and that was what really attracted me to Wolfson.

Can you explain how cochlear implants work?

After I finished my undergraduate degrees, I did a short stint at a startup company that was working with cochlear implant software. A cochlear implant is one step up from a hearing aid, which is essentially a really fancy equalizer: it amplifies different frequencies of sound. A cochlear implant is much more complicated than that because it is actually replacing part of your outer auditory system. It bypasses the outer parts of the peripheral auditory system and can give someone who is deaf a perception of sound by directly talking to their auditory nerves. 

What does your current research focus on?

The specific project that I did my PhD on is called the Panoramic ECAP Method. People lose their hearing for different reasons, and no cochlear implant patient looks the same. When we are sending in electrical pulses, we make an assumption that all of their neurons are responsive in some way or another, but the only way to really know what an individual’s pattern of auditory neural health is taking out the tissue and imaging it, which we obviously can't do because we need the person to still be able to hear.

The algorithm that I've been working on, the Panoramic ECAP Method, takes measurements of the response of the nerves to each individual electrode within the cochlea. These are called ECAPs, or Electrically Evoked Compound Action Potentials. Essentially what my method does is it takes a bunch of different combinations of measurements from pairs of electrodes along the entire length of the cochlear array and measures the response.

We extract both the overall response of the nerve along the length of the cochlea and how much overlap there is between channels, and this can give us a whole picture, or a fingerprint, of what the interaction between the specific patient's cochlea and their cochlear implant looks like. In the future, it could help us to personalise the software, and tailor it exactly to a specific patient for their exact pattern of hearing loss.

The cool thing about the project at the moment is that it has a lot of momentum, so I've been able to get two small grants to try and develop it. It's also very clinically translatable, so in addition to it being really interesting to a lot of other cochlear implant researchers with whom I’ve been collaborating - “neural health” is a hot topic in the field at the moment - it's also something that the cochlear implant manufacturers and various hearing implant clinics have started paying attention to. 

Tell us a bit about your work as Chair of the Equality and Diversity Committee.

I've been involved on the Equality and Diversity Committee at the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit for maybe four years, and I'm now the Chair of it. In my department, there are several people who are openly queer, and just having queer people in leadership roles makes such a big difference. It made me feel like I could actually be involved and be myself at work.

EDI has always been very important to me, particularly growing up in the US. My father is Mexican, and that doesn't make a huge difference here, but certainly growing up in the US, you're discriminated against in a different way for having a Mexican last name. And I'm queer, and I was a woman working in engineering, so there are a number of ways in which I didn't feel like I was really part of the crowd.

Some of the things we've done include small culture changes. In departmental seminars, for instance, now, anyone hosting it knows that they have to open the floor for early career researchers to ask questions first. Another thing that we're doing recently that came out of an Equality and Diversity Festival that we had – we didn't really have subtitles by default in our lecture theatre before. As someone who works in hearing, it's kind of ironic that we don't!

Next year, we're also thinking of piloting short sessions where we add an additional week on to our departmental research seminars where we do a session on diversifying curriculums or diversifying sample populations, which is something hopefully that is relevant and interesting to everybody.