Ms.
Irina S. Sigalovsky and Dr. Hanfeng Yuan will share
the Helen Carr Peake Research Prize for 2004
Prize promotes excellence in student biomedical
research
For Immediate Release
MONDAY, 2 April 2004
Contact: William Smith, Assistant Director for Finance
and Sponsor Relations
Phone: +1.617.253.5621
Email: whs@mit.edu
CAMBRIDGE, MA. 04.02.2004
The Research Laboratory
of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) announces that Ms. Irina S.
Sigalovsky and Dr. Hanfeng Yuan will share the Helen
Carr Peake Research Prize for 2004.
Ms. Sigalovsky is a graduate student in the Speech
and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program within
the Division of Health
Sciences and Technology. Her doctoral research is being
performed at the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory (EPL) of
the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary under the supervision
of Professor Jennifer R. Melcher. One component of
her thesis examines the representation of sound
intensity throughout the auditory pathway. A second
component spatially maps the gray matter myelin content
and thickness in the
auditory cortex. Combined with functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), this work should ultimately
allow cortical neuroanatomy and
function to be directly related in individual humans.
Ms. Sigalovsky has reported her myelin imaging work
as the first author on a poster
at the 2003 annual meeting of the Association for Research
in Otolaryngology, and in an oral presentation at the
International Conference on Auditory Cortex, which
was held in Magdeburg, Germany, in September 2003.
Dr. Yuan recently completed her Ph.D. degree in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science. Her dissertation
research, which
was jointly supervised by Mr. Nathaniel I. Durlach
and Dr. Charlotte
M. Reed, was performed in the Research
Laboratory of Electonics
(RLE), where Dr. Yuan is now a postdoctoral associate.
In this work, Dr. Yuan addressed problems relating
to tactual communication aids
for persons with profound hearing loss. She identified
a reliable cue to initial consonant voicing that is
simple to derive in real
time, and showed that it could be succesfully presented
through two different sinusoidal vibrations applied
to the index finger and
thumb, respectively. Her results showed the highest
performance level yet achieved with a tactual display
in pairwise discrimination,
and evidence that the tactual cue could be integrated
with speechreading to provide susbstantial benefits
in identifying
consonant segments.
The Helen Carr Peake Research Prize was established
through a donation of Dr. Sheldon Pang, an RLE/EPL
alumnus. It consists of an
annual award of $2000 to an MIT student for bioengineering
research performed in either RLE or EPL. This year
is the second time the
prize is being awarded. The prize presentation to Ms.
Sigalovsky and Dr. Yuan will occur later this spring
at an award luncheon.
Helen Carr Peake, the wife of Professor William
T. Peake, passed away in 2002. Dr. Pang's gift honors
her memory and commemorates the
profound influence of the Peakes on his education and
professional development. The selection of Ms. Sigalovsky
and Dr. Yuan was done
by a committee consisting of Professor Dennis
M. Freeman (MIT/RLE), Professor Jeffrey
H. Shapiro (MIT, Director
RLE), Professor M.
Charles Liberman (Harvard, Director EPL), and Professor
William T. Peake (MIT/RLE/EPL).
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