Dr Ben Williges is a Hearing Technology and Audiological Engineer. He is currently working on measuring cortical responses in adults with Cochlear implants (CIs), in order to develop objective measures to help understand sound transmission through the electrically stimulated auditory pathways in order to identify the cause of any frequency-specific deficits. Ben will be applying this knowledge to evaluate whether we can use objective measures to inform bilateral CI mapping for optimizing binaural cues in people with two CIs. This will involve exploring measures for aligning channels and objectively testing the perception of inter-aural timing differences (ITDs). These approaches will use modelling predictions to guide interventions.

Ben was awarded his PhD in December 2019 from the University of Oldenburg, Germany. The research focused on understanding spatial speech in noise perception for listeners with bimodal hearing devices, i.e. a CI in one ear combined with a hearing aid in the other ear. The methods employed ranged from psychophysical and speech perception measurements with adults using bimodal hearing devices to acoustic simulation of CI processing with normal hearing listeners and computational auditory modelling to predict outcomes. Ben is also exploring approaches for optimizing bilateral mapping based on combining models developed at Oldenburg University. This is a joint collaboration between the SOUND Lab and Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Prof Mathias Dietz and Dr Hongmei Hu).

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Publications: See Ben Williges’s Google Scholar