A Cambridge student developing a new technique to fine-tune hearing aids in young children has won the 2006 Pauline Ashley Prize awarded by Deafness Research UK, the only national charity dedicated to supporting medical research into deafness and other hearing problems.

Deafness Research UK announced today that Karolina Kluk, a third year PhD student at Lucy Cavendish College, won the 2006 prize which will allow her to spend time working at a leading lab in Canada and bring skills and knowledge back to the UK.

The Pauline Ashley Prize, established in memory of the charity’s founder, Lady Ashley of Stoke, is awarded annually to a talented young scientist near the beginning of their career and undertaking research into deafness, or a related condition such as tinnitus.

Deaf adults and children are often unable to hear sounds at certain frequencies – maybe high or low or both. These are known as “dead regions” and represent an area of the inner ear or cochlea where the hearing cells have died off or aren’t working properly.

Hearing aids work by amplifying the overall amount of sound transmitted into the inner ear. But sound directed towards these dead regions is wasted. Hearing aids could be made more effective if scientists were able to work out the precise location of an individual patient’s dead regions and fine-tune the hearing aid so that it only amplifies sound to the parts of the cochlea which are still functioning normally.

Kluk is trying to develop the first objective way of testing for dead regions. All hearing tests are currently subjective and rely on patients giving accurate responses while listening to a series of tones or “bleeps”. But very young infants can’t do this, so an objective test will enable researchers to calculate the location of dead regions in deaf babies for the first time.

Kluk will work with Professor Terence Picton from the University of Toronto in Canada to compare the results of normal adult hearing tests with another method which measures the brain’s response to sounds while the subject is asleep. Once perfected, this technique would be ideal for testing young babies, by playing sounds at different frequencies while they sleep.

This research will feed into a larger project also funded by Deafness Research UK and led by Kluk’s supervisor Professor Brian Moore in the Auditory Perception Group at the University of Cambridge. This major project hopes to develop a reliable method for improving the tuning of hearing aids for children.

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