Ruth Litovsky

Ruth Litovsky, PhD is Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Departments of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Surgery/Division of Otolaryngology. She directs the Doctorate in Audiology Program, and the Binaural Hearing and Speech Laboratory at the Waisman Center. Professor Litovsky is actively involved in the fields of hearing research and auditory implants. She has served on numerous grant review panels and editorial boards. In recent years, she was elected chair of the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses at Asilomar in 2011, elected Councilor for the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and Program Committee Chair of the Midwinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, Associate Editor for Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Litovsky received her PhD in 1991 in Developmental Psychology, with post-doctoral training in auditory neurophysiology and psychoacoustics. Her research focuses on binaural hearing, covering lifespan of humans to include infants and elderly adults, with populations of normal-hearing persons and those who are deaf and use cochlear implants. At the heart of her research questions is the issue of bilateral cochlear implants. In adults the research questions focus on the ability of people with onset of deafness in childhood vs. adulthood to integrate information from the two ears with fidelity and precision, and the extent to which functional outcomes such as sound localization and speech understanding in complex environments is similar in these individuals compared with normal hearing listeners. This research program has been funded continuously by grants from the NIH-NIDCD since 1995.