Faglige nøgleord: Signal processing, hearing aids, interdisciplinary
Oplæg tilgængeligt på: Engelsk og tysk
I am part of the hearing systems group at DTU Health Tech. In our group, we investigate how humans perceive sound and how we can help individuals with hearing loss. Being hearing impaired has a huge impact on your social life: you may easily feel disconnected from other people, start to isolate yourself, or be seen differently by others. Your whole character might even change. Putting myself in the shoes of these individuals and trying to understand how that must feel is my main motivation for my PhD.
My PhD primarily targets signal processing in hearing aids and/or cochlear implants, and how to improve that so people with hearing impairment can have an easier time understanding others in difficult acoustic situations, such as in a noisy restaurant. This field is highly interdisciplinary, as it combines physics, biology, and psychology, among other disciplines.
If the students are up for it, I would also like to share my path to the PhD. I started with a bachelor's in music (classical guitar) in Austria, pursued another bachelor's in electrical engineering in Germany, and then came to DTU for the Engineering Acoustics master's. I would be happy to share my journey to show that the path to a PhD does not need to be a straight line from start to finish.