The Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Science and Biotechnology (SHBT) is the only one of its kind in the country – a tight-knit research community dedicated to multidisciplinary training in basic, clinical and applied approaches to the study of all aspects of human communication and the treatment of its disorders.
SHBT includes more than 60 faculty members and roughly 50 students at various stages in their doctoral work, operating out of more than 20 different labs at Harvard, MIT, Boston University and the Harvard teaching hospitals.
As one of eight multi-disciplinary graduate programs within the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), we capitalize on the superb resources of the broader
Harvard/MIT research community.
As you can see from the following examples, our faculty’s diverse research interests range across speech, hearing, voice, language and balance, including work such as:
Although many of these pursuits may seem unrelated, we are constantly learning from and inspiring each other in unexpected ways, across the conventional boundaries of our fields.
What unites all our faculty is a fascination with speech and hearing, broadly defined; a belief that progress in today's complex scientific environment requires active collaboration among engineers, physical scientists, biological scientists and clinicians; and the understanding that translating lab discoveries into real-world applications requires linking our efforts with appropriate industrial partners.
SHBT belongs to the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, which shares our multidisciplinary philosophy.
For more than 35 years, HST has dedicated itself to training both clinically literate PhDs, and MDs with strong quantitative and analytic skills. All of HST’s interdisciplinary doctoral training programs feature a strong quantitative orientation, involve hands-on experience in a clinical or industrial setting, and require students to complete a focused, interdisciplinary research project. While SHBT students share important aspects of their training with other HST graduate students, the curricula and faculty of the other programs also help our students develop an expansive view of science and its relationship to clinical practice and biomedical industries.
Our students come to us from diverse intellectual and academic disciplines. During their training years, they learn from us -- and, just as important, from each other -- in the multidisciplinary melting pot that is HST. They leave with an exciting range of ideas about how best to use their graduate training to improve human communication.
Of the seven to nine students we admit each year, most receive three years of support through a training grant from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).
Our students are actively engaged not only with their research, but also within the SHBT, MIT and Harvard communities. As a recent example, the current web site development was spearheaded in 2006 by SHBT students with contributions from the faculty and Maryann Czerepak (MIT Publishing Services Bureau). We'd like to thank Brad Buran, Erik Larsen, Cara Stepp, Tom DiCicco, Nicolas Malyska, Daryush Mehta, and Ryuji Suzuki for their efforts on this project, as well as faculty members Bertrand Delgutte, Louis Braida, Robert Hillman and Jennifer Melcher.
Since our founding in 1992, we have graduated about 60 PhDs. Many have entered post-doctoral training programs that led to faculty appointments and promising careers as young investigators who earn their own research grants. Others have chosen to enter the private sector, where they have risen to lead research and development teams working on communication technologies for health care, commercial or military applications. A few are using their rigorous bioengineering training to develop new technologies in the broader biotech arena. Some envision a future role in shaping public policy in science and healthcare.
No matter what career you decide to build, SHBT's broad, demanding curriculum and close student-faculty connections constitute a first-rate foundation.
