Dr. Ing. H. C. (Christiaan) Stronks

I am leading the front-end processing group for cochlear implants within the Center of Audiology and Hearing implants. I am a Biologist by training and specialized in the electrophysiology of the inner ear (PhD). After a postdoctoral fellowship in the US focusing on the electrophysiology and psychophysics of retinal implant patients at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, USA I joined the NICTA (now Data 61) team in Canberra, ACT, Australia where I focused on sensory substitution devices for the blind.

My primary area of interest is restoring or substituting the senses and investigating the consequences of artificial sensory sensation and perception at the neural and cognitive level. I do this at a variety of levels, from the far periphery by recording neural activity in response to artificial sensory stimuli to the cognitive level by deploying psychophysical tools.

Cochlear implants are very successful and currently the primary line of treatment for many severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss, including age-related loss of hearing. Yet the subjective quality of the sound perception is poor. At this time my focus is on extending the standard clinical performance outcome measure (that is, speech recognition score) of cochlear implant users with subjective ones that represent listening effort, fatigue and listening satisfaction. My mission is to make artificial sound great again.