2025-2026 Bloedel Trainee Awards
| Trainee: Noelle Abbott, PhD
Affiliate Mentor: Gabriel Cler, PhD Dept: Speech and Hearing Sciences |
Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Auditory and Non-Auditory Processing Speed Deficits in Adults with DLD |
| Trainee: Farhin Ahmed, PhD
Affiliate Mentor: Bonnie Lau, PhD Dept: Otolaryngology-HNS |
Seeing to hear better: Audiovisual Integration in Autistic Children |
| Trainee: Selina Baeza-Loya, PhD
Affiliate Mentor: David Raible, PhD Dept: Otolaryngology-HNS |
Characterization of zebrafish vestibular afferent neurons subpopulations |
| Trainee: Jeffery Parra Munevar
Affiliate Mentor: William Spain, PhD Dept: Neurobiology & Biophysics |
Exploring the Auditory Neural Code – Insights from Single-cell Profiling |
2025-2026 Mini-Grant Awards
| Affiliate Principal Investigator: David L. Horn, MD, MS Associate Professor |
$10,000 Award Behavioral and Electrophysiological Characterization of Auditory Acuity in Children with Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder |
| Affiliate Principal Investigator: David W. Raible, PhD Professor Depts: Otolaryngology-HNS, Neurobiology & Biophysics Affiliate Co-Investigator: Shuyi Ma, PhD Assistant Professor Dept: Pediatrics |
$10,000 Award Testing efficacy of macrolide compounds to protect mammalian hair cells against aminoglycoside ototoxicity |
| Affiliate Principal Investigator: Amy Pace, PhD Associate Professor Dept: Speech & Hearing Sciences |
$5,000 Award What Dual Language Learners Hear in the Home Language Environment Matters: Using Audio Recordings to Guide Parent Coaching |
2022-2025 Bloedel Scholar
Ione Fine, PhD
Professor – Psychology
Dr. Fine studied Experimental Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford and did her PhD with Robert Jacobs at Rochester, NY. She then went to the University of California, San Diego to do a postdoc with Donald MacLeod and Karen Dobkins. After a brief spell at Second Sight Medical Products Inc., she joined the faculty at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on exploring how the human brain adapts to being blind and developing new technologies for sight recovery (‘bionic eyes’).
From her Year Two report, presented in August 2024:
The Bloedel Scholarship has allowed me to significantly reduce my teaching time, allowing me to focus more of my time on research.
- Funding towards new grants or professional awards:
- K99 awarded to Woon Ju Park (I am mentor).
- R01 awarded to Justin Golub (I am collaborator). Early Age-Related Hearing Loss Investigation (EARHLI): A Randomized Controlled Trial to Assess the Mechanisms Linking Early Age-Related Hearing Loss and Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias.
- Mentoring graduate student dissertations and/or admission to further programs:
- One of the major achievements of this year is that Woon Ju Park, a highly talented postdoctoral researcher focused on sensory plasticity, with an emphasis on auditory processing in blind individuals, received a job offer at Georgia Tech.
- Further proposals that have resulted, or are expected:
- Application for a T32 award in May 2024. The work for this will begin in September.
- Application for a multisite R01 in 2024.