Hearing Associates recently sponsored a series of talks given by hearing loss experts on a variety of hearing health care topics.
The talks – including a presentation by Stuart Trembath, Hearing Associates owner and president – were part of the 2018 North Iowa Educational-Cultural Exchange (NIECE) Project. The event was hosted by the Clear Lake Arts Center and featured talks on autism, hearing aids, hearing-assistive technologies and the management of chronic health care conditions.
The eight-day NIECE Project brought three audiology and three speech-language pathology graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico-Medical Sciences Campus to Iowa for the cultural and educational event. Meant to offset the weeks of graduate school the students missed following Hurricane Maria in September 2017, the event gave the students an opportunity to visit Hearing Associates in Mason City, as well as the Mayo Clinic’s audiology, balance, and speech-language-pathology facilities.
In addition to Trembath, the audiology conference and appreciation banquet that concluded the trip featured three other nationally recognized experts in audiology. The featured speaker was Erin Schafer, Ph.D., professor and director of graduate studies in audiology at the University of North Texas. Her keynote address was titled “Auditory Deficits in Children Who Have Autism Spectrum Disorders.”
Trembath is a friend of Jeffery Cokely, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of North Texas, who developed the NIECE Project with María Jiménez Castro, Ph.D. of the University of Puerto Rico-Medical Sciences Campus. Trembath agreed to provide travel scholarships for the graduate students, as well as a stipend for their faculty mentor.
The two other speakers at the event were Drs. Carol Cokely (University of Texas at Dallas) and Leisha Eiten (Boys Town National Research Hospital).