Meet the Researcher Z. Ellen Peng, Ph.D. General Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International

EMERGING RESEARCH GRANTS

Meet the Researcher

Emerging Research Grants (ERG)

As one of the leading funding sources available for innovative research, HHF’s ERG program is critical. Without our support, scientists would not have the needed resources for cutting-edge approaches toward understanding, preventing, and treating hearing and balance disorders.

Z. Ellen Peng, Ph.D.

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Peng received her doctorate in engineering from University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at RWTH Aachen University in Germany and is now a research associate at the Waisman Center and a lecturer at the department of communication sciences and disorders, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Peng’s 2020 Emerging Research Grant is generously funded by the General Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International.

the origin of my present research goes way back: In my college application I wrote that I wanted to study how poor indoor acoustics affects kids’ ability to learn. At the time, my high school had decided to put in a loudspeaker system without altering classroom interiors, and afterward I noticed I had a hard time concentrating in class, possibly because it took too much effort to fully hear everything. This high school experience and my subsequent training led to my current project.

through early cochlear implant (CI) fitting, many children diagnosed with profound hearing loss gain access to verbal communication and, through electrical hearing, go on to develop spoken language. But despite good speech outcomes as tested in the sound booth, many children who use CIs experience difficulty understanding speech in most noisy and reverberant indoor environments, like classrooms. I will be using acoustic virtual reality and measures of neural activity to better understand how CIs process degraded speech in adverse sound environments.

my dad, an acoustician, taught me how to do logarithmic decibel addition before multiplication—it was fun to show this off as a second grader! As a young kid, I also saw my mom, a pediatrician, working overnight in the NICU (unintended “bring your daughter to work” experiences!) and where I remember seeing very sick babies. I think this primed me for a career using science/ engineering to help children in need. so it was not a personal connection to hearing loss that led me to what I do now. It was more the realization that not every child has a fair start in life, and wondering how can I make it more fair? I am grateful to have the technical background and scientific training to contribute to making this world a better place for children with hearing loss.

i’m bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, and I managed to teach myself Korean after I met my husband, who’s from South Korea. In Germany I could eventually understand 10 to 20 percent. Now I enjoy confusing and teaching our toddler the names for various objects in different languages!

Z. Ellen Peng, Ph.D., is generously funded by the General Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International. We thank the Royal Arch Masons for their ongoing commitment to research in the area of central auditory processing disorders (CAPD).

We need your help funding the exciting work of hearing and balance scientists. Please consider donating today to Hearing Health Foundation to support groundbreaking research. Visit hhf.org/how-to-help.

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