Meet the experts

Ruth Litovsky, PhD, is Oros Family chair, and currently chair of the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  She has a joint appointment in the Department of Surgery, Division of Otolaryngology. Litovsky directs the Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab at the Waisman Center, and is faculty member of the Neuroscience Training Program.  Professor Litovsky received her BA and MA degrees in Psychology, PhD in Developmental Psychology, and postdoctoral training in Neurophysiology. In 2001 she began her position on faculty at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her ongoing research program has been funded since 1995 by grants from NIH-NIDCD, in addition to grants from smaller foundations and collaborative projects with cochlear implant companies. She has published over 150 papers and book chapters based on her research which focuses hearing abilities covering lifespan of humans to include infants and elderly adults. Her research program is dedicated to understanding hearing restoration with cochlear implants, in particular the impact of bilateral implantation, and more recently single-sided deafness. Her lab recently received supplemental funding from NIDCD to study auditory function in conjunction with cognition and language in young adults with Down Syndrome. The lab uses a combination of approaches including psychophysics and reverse engineering to explore how binaural hearing can be restored cochlear implant users with fidelity; pupillometry and eye gaze measures to examine ‘real time’ processing of information and listening effort during perceptual tasks; and more recently functional neuroimaging to investigate neural signatures for bilateral benefits and cognitive load. She has earned a number of honors and awards for her research and service, including a Fullbright Scholarship, Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America, Past-President of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (2020-2021), elected chair of the 2022 Auditory System Gordon Research Conference, Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and she was honored with the 2021 Carhart Memorial Lecture at the American Auditory Society.

Dr. Tia Oliverio completed her undergraduate work at University of Pittsburgh and completed her Au.D. at Arizona State University. She is currently a staff audiologist and clinical preceptor at Pittsburgh VAMC, specializing in electrophysiology and vestibular evaluations.