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HHF
New board members Nancy Young, M.D. (above), and Sharon Kujawa, Ph.D.
HHF Welcomes Two New Board Members... Two new members joined Hearing Health Foundation’s Board of Directors this spring, bringing specific insights on hearing loss from excess noise and cochlear implantation. Sharon Kujawa, Ph.D., is a professor of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School; a principal investigator at EatonPeabody Laboratories, Mass Eye and Ear; and director of audiology research and the Sheldon and Dorothea Buckler Chair in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at Mass Eye and Ear. She received her doctorate from the University of Arizona, where she was later named Distinguished Alumnus in Speech and Hearing. The American Academy of Audiology, where she served two terms on the executive board and received the 2010 Distinguished Achievement Award, describes her as “one of the field’s most active and accomplished audiologists and scientists.” Dr. Kujawa received a 1999 Emerging Research Grant (ERG) for a project titled “Ménière’s Disease: 8
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Monitoring Pharmacologic Manipulations,” and since 2013 she has been a member of HHF’s Council of Scientific Trustees, the scientific advisory body that oversees the ERG program. Her research focuses on primary causes of hearing loss like noise exposure and aging, aiming to reveal the underlying cellular damage and its consequences to hearing function. In recent years, this work has given rise to the concept of “hidden hearing loss”—declines in hearing function that are not revealed by the threshold audiogram, but are well known to those who experience them. (Dr. Kujawa will be presenting on this topic for our April 25 webinar, which will be recorded and available at hhf.org/webinar.) Nancy Young, M.D., is the Lillian S. Well Professor of Pediatric Otolaryngology and a fellow of the Knowles Hearing Center of Northwestern University, and the medical director of the Cochlear Implant Program, which she founded in 1991, at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in
