#  World Hearing Day, March 3, 2025. 

 





March 03, 2025

 

 

To commemorate World Hearing Day 2025, SHBT is spotlighting a student and her advisor working in the human audition research area.

Annesya Banerjee is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience Technology. Her dissertation advisor is Dr. [Josh McDermott](https://web.mit.edu/jhm/www/), a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences who leads the Laboratory for Computational Audition at MIT.

Annesya and Josh study auditory perception in people with severe hearing loss treated with cochlear implants. Cochlear implants consist of an array of electrodes that stimulate the auditory nerve to restore a sense of hearing. Although they enable hearing when it would not otherwise be possible, cochlear implants do not fully restore normal hearing abilities, and the outcomes are highly variable across different people for reasons that are not fully understood.

Annesya seeks to understand these outcomes in terms of the information that candidate cochlear implant designs should, in principle, provide. She implements machine models of perception that are optimized to perform speech recognition and sound localization from simulations of cochlear-implant-stimulated nerve responses.

The models should indicate how well a particular implant design should enable someone to perform auditory tasks. Annesya’s dissertation will also involve the development of new cochlear implant designs, using models to test out candidate designs, the most promising of which could be piloted in human users.



 

 

 



 

 

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