Sandra Gordon-Salant

Sandra Gordon-Salant, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. She holds editorial roles at major journals like the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and has served on National Academy of Sciences committees addressing hearing impairments. Her research focuses on aging and hearing loss effects on auditory processes, signal enhancement for hearing-impaired listeners, and speech understanding in older populations.

Dr. Gordon-Salant earned her Ph.D. in Audiology at Northwestern University (1981). Her work has been continuously funded by the NIH’s National Institute on Aging since 1986. Key honors include the James Jerger Career Award (2009), ASHA’s Al Kawana Award (2013), and the University of Maryland’s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher title (2017).

Her research interests span speech perception, psychoacoustics, aging-related hearing changes, cognitive influences on auditory processing, and assistive signal processing technologies. Over 110 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including co-editing The Aging Auditory System, highlight her contributions. Current studies explore age-related deficits in temporal processing, cochlear-implant user performance, and audiovisual speech recognition under challenging conditions.

Notable grants include NIH support since 1986, and she leads the UMD Hearing Lab. Former advisees include prominent audiologists like Sarah Hargus Ferguson and Susan L. Phillips. Her recent work (2020–2024) emphasizes training interventions for older cochlear-implant users and real-world speech recognition challenges like those posed by masks and noise.