Join the Boys Town National Research Hospital Research Champions Network for the second Meet the Scientist talk, a series of presentations featuring Boys Town Researchers addressing issues of concern for clinicians. Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham, Ph.D., will present "Hearing Loss and the Developing Brain."
Children who are hard-of-hearing (CHH) are at a heightened risk for language and cognitive difficulties through development. Unfortunately, it is unclear what underlying mechanisms lead to these risks, which makes therapeutic decision-making more difficult. Neuroimaging may hold promise in clarifying the impact of hearing loss and hearing aid use on brain and cognitive development in CHH. This presentation will give an overview of the work being done in the Cognitive and Sensory Imaging Lab to answer these questions, as well as where this research is taking us.
Financial Disclosures and Conflicts of Interest: The work that is being presented was supported by the National Institutes of Health (P20-GM144641, R21-DC020270). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, or reporting of data. I have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Date: August 18, 2025
Time: 12:00 p.m. CT
Location: Zoom
Program Agenda
12:00 PM – Introductions
12:05 PM – Presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham
12:45 PM – Questions and Discussion
12:55 PM – Survey Completion
1:00 PM – Presentation Concludes
Learner Outcomes
- Describe how mild-to-severe hearing loss impacts language and cognitive outcomes in youth
- Introduce how neuroimaging can be used to determine the underlying neural dynamics serving language and cognitive development in children who are hard-of-hearing
- Demonstrate what we know about the impact of differences in auditory experience on brain and cognitive development
About Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham, Ph.D.
Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham, Ph.D., is the director of the Cognitive and Sensory Imaging Laboratory in the Boys Town National Research Hospital Institute for Human Neuroscience. She is a cognitive neuroscientist by training and received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Nebraska – Omaha. Her work utilizes advanced neuroimaging methods such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and structural MRI to identify the dynamics of brain function and dysfunction in children and adults. She has substantial experience in the identification and characterization of oscillatory cortical responses associated with attention, working memory, executive function, auditory processing, and motor control. Dr. Heinrichs-Graham also has an extensive collaborative history and has provided MEG expertise to various teams examining cognitive processing in patients with various neurological and psychiatric disorders, in addition to a wealth of studies focusing on healthy brain development throughout the lifespan.
Boys Town National Research Hospital is approved by the American Academy of Audiology to offer Academy CEUs for this activity. The program is worth a maximum of 0.1 AAA CEUs. Academy approval of this continuing education activity is based on course content only and does not imply endorsement of course content, specific products, or clinical procedure, or adherence of the event to the Academy’s Code of Ethics. Any views that are presented are those of the presenter/CE Provider and not necessarily of the American Academy of Audiology.
