Macyn Hoeveler receives 2025 Beckman Undergraduate Fellowship Award
Macy Hoeveler, an undergraduate at the lab, was recently chosen for one of five Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellowships for 2025. With this fellowship comes a $3,000 award to support involvement in ACN’s TIDE project.
“This fellowship marks the first time I have been able to fully dedicate myself to my passion for auditory research without the burden of financial concern,” Hoeveler said.
Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Jake Carpenter-Thompson
Dr. Jake Carpenter-Thompson serves as the director of clinical research at the Kutcher Clinic for Sports Neurology. He recently published research in conjunction with Dr. Jeffery Kutcher regarding the evaluation and management of sports-related concussions. He and his team are currently working on an assessment of technologies that claim to be able to diagnose a concussion.
Dr. Carpenter-Thompson recalls clearly his experience doing research at U of I on tinnitus. “I worked in conjunction with Dr. Fatima Husain and Dr. Edward McAuley, and we found that people who were more active had less bothersome tinnitus and areas of their brain that were responsible for negative emotions were also less active. Areas in the front of the cortex, which help with top-down control of emotional response, attention, and executive functioning, those areas were more active. So physical activity gave these people better tools to utilize those frontal regions to modulate their mood and make their tinnitus less bothersome.”
ACNLAB at TRI 2025
ACNLAB attended the Tinnitus Research Initiative 2025 in Seoul, an international conference on tinnitus research. Emilia Kaniewska and Gibbeum Kim presented posters on neuroanatomical changes linked to tinnitus and hearing loss, and neural correlates of emotional processing in misophonia and hyperacusis. Congrats to Gibbeum for winning the Best Poster Award!
Code, cognition and creativity: Shagun Ajmera’s path to understanding the brain
While conducting research at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, PhD student Shagun Ajmera has been balancing her love for machine learning, brain science and creativity while working to make sense of complex auditory disorders like tinnitus, misophonia and hyperacusis.
Namitha Jain receives the Empowering Students Scholarship
This scholarship recognizes students with an excellent academic record and exceptional promise as clinical audiologists. The American Academy of Audiology awards up to 6 scholarships of $5,000 each.
Shagun Ajmera receives the 2024 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowship
The Beckman Institute Graduate Fellows Program offers University of Illinois graduate students at the M.A., M.S. or Ph.D. level the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research at the institute. This program is supported by funding from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.
Addressing the world’s big questions requires collaboration across disciplines, and the 2024 Beckman Institute Graduate Fellows are prepared to do just that. With her background in computational neuroscience, Ajmera will use deep learning methods to discover the hidden relationships in these recordings.
ACNLAB at the 2024 Beckman Institute Open House
At BIOH 2024, ACN Lab engaged visitors of all ages with interactive activities, including a spinning wheel on hearing health and a video-otoscope demo. Many attendees, personally impacted by tinnitus, misophonia, or hearing loss, showed great interest in our neuroimaging research.