Matt Goupell, Fellow Researchers Win BBI Seed Grants

Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) professor Matt Goupell and Department of Biology professor Michael Cummings have jointly received $150,000 in seed funding to use machine learning to uncover what drives age-related declines in a person’s ability to hear, reports Melissa Brachfeld in this UMIACS article.

The grant comes from the UMD Brain and Behavior Institute’s 2022 seed grant program, which provided funding to an additional four neurosciences projects focused on aging and development.

Two of those other projects likewise involve researchers from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. One, led by HESP’s Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah and the Department of Psychology’s (PSYC) L. Robert Slevc, will study whether time-based sentence production difficulties drive communication issues for stroke survivors and older adults. Another, led by PSYC’s Elizabeth Redcay, Heather Yarger and Department of African American Studies’ Angel Dunbar, will study whether a specific measure of heart function, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, is an indicator of an individual with autism also having anxiety. 

More information on the project between Goupell, director of HESP’s Ph.D. program, and Cummings, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, can be found here.

Photo caption: From left to right, Matt Goupell, L. Robert Slevc, and Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah (top); Elizabeth Redcay, Heather Yarger, and Angel Dunbar (bottom). 

Published on Fri, Jan 14, 2022 - 12:18PM