Sarah Verhulst

Prof. Dr. Verhulst is Full Professor in Hearing Technology and joined Ghent University in 2016 where she is leading the Hearing Technology lab, an  interdisciplinary group of scientists working on the interface between auditory neuroscience, computational modelling and hearing technologies.  She has a background in electrical and acoustical engineering and received her PhD from the Technical University of Denmark in the topic of cochlear mechanics and otoacoustic emissions. After post-doctoral training at Boston and Harvard University (computational auditory neuroscience), she became Assistant Professor in physiology and modeling of auditory perception at Oldenburg University, and afterwards moved to UGent with an ERC starting grant. Prof. Verhulst's lab hosts several EU (ERC StG, PoC, IEC, ERA-Net Neuron) and FWO research projects and is a member of the Belgian Young Academy of Sciences, a laureate of the Belgian Academy of Sciences (Technical Sciences) and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.

In the Hearing Technology lab, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach to study sound encoding in the normal and impaired auditory system. We combine physiological methods (EEG and otoacoustic emissions) with computational modeling of the auditory periphery to study how different aspects of peripheral hearing loss (cochlear synaptopathy/hidden hearing loss and outer-hair-cell loss) interact and affect sound perception. Our approach to hearing science is unique and able to yield novel and sensitive hearing screening methods as well as efficient hearing restoration strategies. We furthermore focus on novel EEG and neural-network based hearing technologies and on realistic noise-exposure guidelines for an ever-growing ageing and noise-exposed society.