Frederick J. Gallun, Ph.D. is a psychoacoustician with a background in psychology. He recently presented a Keynote Speech at the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago, IL about his research career. You can view the recorded presentation here and the accompanying slides here.

Dr. Gallun received his undergraduate degree from Reed College in 1993 and his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2003, both in cognitive psychology. From 2003-2006, Gallun conducted an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellowship in Communication Disorders at Boston University. In 2006, he joined the VA RR&D National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research, and turned his attention to the auditory processing problems of Veterans. In 2019 he joined the faculty of the Oregon Hearing Research Center.

Dr. Gallun and his colleagues are working to develop new ways to assess the ability to do complex auditory tasks and develop tools to improve or retrain those abilities. Tasks on which they are focused include such things as the ability to listen to one of several people speaking at the same time. Participants range in age from 18 to 89 and have hearing that varies from very good to moderately poor. Some participants have been near explosions during their military career, or have suffered blows to the head. Some of them have no complaints about their ability to hear and understand speech, while others find listening in noisy environments to be very difficult.

Dr. Gallun was interviewed on CogNation, a podcast by Rolf Nelson and Joe Hardy, two cognitive psychologists interested in the future of brain science and technology. (And yes, the beginning is meant to sound that way - it's thematic!)

CogNation Episode 20, October 22, 2019