Area of Research
Kathy Pichora-Fuller’s research program concerns auditory aging and her clinical research concerns audiological rehabilitation for older adults. She has earned an international reputation for her interdisciplinary approach in linking research on auditory and cognitive processing during communication in everyday life.
Profile
Kathy Pichora-Fuller worked for several years as a Clinical Audiologist and the Audiology Supervisor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto before she undertook doctoral studies in Psychology at the University of Toronto in 1986. She was on faculty in the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia for ten years before joining the faculty at UTM in 2002. At UBC, she was also the Director of the Institute for Hearing Accessibility Research. From 2004 to 2017 she was an Adjunct Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute on the “Communication Team” working in iDAPT (Intelligent Design for Adaptation, Participation, and Technology: Innovative Rehabilitation for People in Challenging Environments), funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. She was a Guest Professor in the Linneaus Centre for Hearing and Deafness Research at Linköping University in Sweden from 2010 to 2014. She became an Adjunct Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest in Toronto in 2013. Her research has been funded primarily by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, but she has also been a co-investigator on research funded by agencies in Sweden and the USA. She is the hearing expert for the CIHR Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging and a member of the sensory-cognitive team of the CIHR Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging. She translates her lab-based research on auditory and cognitive aging to address the needs of older adults who suffer from both hearing and cognitive impairments, with a new focus on social engagement and healthy aging. She was President of the Canadian Association of Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists (1984-87), has served on the executive boards of the Canadian Acoustical Association (1998-2002, 2011-2016), the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (1997-2003), the Canadian Academy of Audiology (2002-2004) and as the Canadian representative to the International Society of Audiology (2004-2010; 2014-2016). She was co-chair of the World Congress of Audiology held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in September 2016 and was recently elected as president-elect of the International Collegium of Rehabiltative Audiology. The American Academy of Audiology awarded her the 2014 International Award.