Cochlear implants are the most successful neural sensory prosthesis, partially restoring the sensation of sound and understanding of speech to severe-to-profoundly hearing-impaired individuals. However, cochlear implants do not "cure" deafness and they do work equally for everyone. Cochlear implants provide a novel way of understanding central neural processing of sound as they bypass peripheral encoding.
Dr. Goupell is the director of the Auditory Perception and Modeling Lab, located at the University of Maryland in College Park. He grew up in Mt. Pleasant, MI. He attended Hope College, majoring in physics and mathematics. He studied with Bill Hartmann, and graduated from Michigan State University in 2005 with his PhD in physics. His dissertation was on modeling how the binaural system detects small differences between the ears. He spent three years in Vienna, Austria working for the Academy of Sciences in the lab of Bernhard Laback, where he researched sound localization in bilateral cochlear-implant users. He then moved to Madison, WI to the Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab of Ruth Litovsky for two years. He began his work investigating binaural masking level differences and decorrelation detection with cochlear-implant users. In the fall of 2011, he started as an assistant professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at UMD. He continues to focus his research on cochlear implants, sound localization, understanding speech in noise, and neural modeling. He teaches hearing science, psychoacoustics, and cochlear implants.