Question: In what way will your research help people?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 15 Jun 2015:

I hope that my research will help people in all sorts of ways – some of it in the near future, and some of it will take longer. At the moment, I’m working on a study to understand how the brain develops differently when a person is profoundly deaf (compared to a hearing person). We want to be able to find a thing that we can measure in a person (like how big a certain part of the brain is or how hard it works while someone is looking at pictures) before they undergo treatment (like treatment to partially restore hearing with a cochlear implant) that can be used to predict how well that person will do after treatment. We can use this information to be able to tell someone how much benefit they are likely to get from treatment, and so they can make a more informed decision. Patients will sometimes do better just because they know a bit more about what to expect! Also, we might find that someone with a particular pattern of brain activity would do better if they were taught to think about sounds in a certain way. If they have never heard a sound before in their whole life, then maybe they need to be taught to think about them like pictures, or like vibrations, and therefore we can give them some special training (we call this rehabilitation) to improve their chances.
But aside from what I am doing right now, I am also just generally making brain imaging techniques a little bit better – so in order to do my current work, I need to find a way to make two brain imaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging and near infrared spectroscopy) work together better. This might be useful for all sorts of other applications at a later date – but right now I have no idea what those might be! That’s part of why it’s so exciting to me!