Workshop to Study Toxins' Threat to Hearing

UT Dallas doctoral audiology students and audiologists from around the state will gather Saturday at the UT Dallas Callier Center for Communication Disorders to learn more about ototoxicity, the damage to hearing by certain medications and environmental toxins.

The six-hour workshop will be at the Callier Center Inwood Lane location.  This seminar is part of the annual Bruton Conference Series on Communication Disorders.

The featured speaker is Kathleen C.M. Campbell, Ph.D., a professor and director of audiology research at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.  Dr. Campbell is an internationally know lecturer who focuses on ototoxicity, noise-induced hearing loss and otoprotective agents.  She is the author of Essential Audiology for Physicians and Ototoxicity and Pharmacology for Audiologists.

Some medications and treatments for disease, such as chemotherapy medications and drugs used to treat infants with serious bacterial illness, can cause hearing loss.  Campbell will discuss how these agents cause damage, what audiologists can do to limit the negative effects, which drugs can be used in place of the more dangerous ones, and new frontiers in protective agents.

“The audiology faculty selected Kathleen Campbell as the featured speaker because ototoxicity is an important topic for our students to understand,” said Dr. Lee Wilson, head of the clinical audiology department at the Callier Center.

The UT Dallas audiology program recently built on its reputation as one of the top-ranked audiology programs in the nation by climbing to No. 4 in U.S. News and World Report’s 2008 graduate school rankings.

The UT Dallas Master’s Program in Communication Disorders also jumped in the national rankings.  It moved up five spots among speech-pathology graduate programs, from No. 17 to No. 12, out of 230.

The newest rankings put both the audiology and speech-pathology graduate programs in the top 5 percent nationally in their respective disciplines.  Both programs are taught at the Callier Center.

The Bruton Conference is made possible by a gift from the David J. Bruton, Jr. Charitable Trust.  The conference is for students and professionals in the field of audiology.

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