New Ida Advisory Board Members

By Amanda Farah Cox

We’re very pleased to welcome the following new members to the Ida Institute Board of Advisors:

Christine Yoshinaga-Itano, PhD is a Professor of Audiology and Chair in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, faculty of the Institute of Cognitive Science, Center for Neurosciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also serves as a Professor of Audiology at the Department of Otolaryngology and Audiology at the University of Colorado, Denver and at the Marion Downs Hearing Center. She previously participated in a post-session workshop on the My World tool.

Sue Archbold is the Chief Executive of the Ear Foundation, a charity which funded the first pediatric cochlear implants in the UK, which she helped to found. She previously ran the Nottingham Cochlear Implant Programme for 15 years. She has published widely on deaf education, cochlear implants, and integrating long-term management and daily progress into the community.

De Wet Swanepoel is an audiologist and currently a professor in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. A founding member of the Tele-Audiology Network and co-chair of the Tele-audiology Task Force at the American Academy of Audiology, he is a contributor to the Ida Institute’s Tele-health work stream of our VIsion 2020 project.

Deborah Ferrari, PhD is a professor of audiology at the Speech Language Pathology and Audiology Department, School of Dentistry of Bauru, University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is part of a group, in partnerships with Hospital Samaritano in Sao Paulo, piloting an Auditory Rehabilitation Distance Learning Course training hearing care professionals to provide family-centered, audiologic rehabilitation services to infants and toddlers. Earlier this year, she helped to coordinate the Ida Institute’s participation in Brazil at the Speech Language Pathology and Audiology Conference at the University of Sao Paulo in the state of Bauru.

Uwe Hermann joined the Eriksholm Research Centre -- which, like the Ida Institute, is funded by Oticon AS -- as Senior Director in 2013. Research themes at Eriksholm include outcome measures in hearing aid research and the hearing aid user’s own voice (focusing on problems caused by the occlusion effect). Prior to that, he spent 17 years in various roles at Siemens, including research and development.

They join current board members Adrian Davis, Lucille Beck, and Louise Hickson.