Susan Scollie, Ph.D.
National Centre for Audiology
Pediatrics
London, Ontario, Canada
Professional Bio:
Susan Scollie, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Together with Dr. Richard Seewald, she co-directs the Siemens Child Amplification laboratory at Canada’s National Centre for Audiology. Dr. Scollie has served on committees to develop Preferred Practice Guidelines for the prescription of hearing aids in both adults and children for the College of Audiologists and Speech-Language Pathologists of Ontario, and is a consultant for the Ontario Infant Hearing Program. She has completed efficacy studies of digital and directional hearing aids, evaluated the accuracy of probe microphone measurements, and provided technical support for the DSL[i/o] prescriptive algorithm to clinicians and industry. More recently, she and her colleagues have developed version 5.0 of the DSL Method for hearing aid fitting.
What got you started in the field?
...otosclerosis runs in my family, and my grandmother wore (and benefitted from) hearing aids for as long as I remember. I originally wanted to become a speech-language pathologist, but after some exposure to clinical audiology, I realized that I had found a good fit.
Do you have any interesting/funny stories from when you
first started out in the profession?
...a little guy at a residential school who dropped by my office at the end of the day, stuck his little face just inside the door and said "thank you for fixing my hearing aid". It was a culturally deaf school, but he lived at home with his hearing parents - as a new clinician I would have expected him to be too young to care one way or the other. From that experience and others since, I've learned not to underestimate kids - they know what they like and will tell you if you ask them.
What is your favorite thing about your job?
...it would either be my students or the constant challenge of new research problems - hard to pick one over the other. |