Sina Buchholz from Fraunhofer IDMT in Oldenburg received the Student Conference Award from the National Hearing Conservation Association (NHCA). The NHCA is an international association of hearing conservationists from fields such as audiology, medicine, occupational health, acoustics, and research. In the context of her promotion, Sina Buchholz is working in the project “ProSA” on the influence of hearing protection systems on situational awareness.

The recipients of the Student Conference Award receive a one-year membership in the NHCA as well as a free ticket and a generous reimbursement of travel expenses to the NHCA Conference which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, this year. Sina Buchholz attended the conference together with PD Dr. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth.

Both contributed to the conference program with their own talks. Sina Buchholz presented her research results on level-dependent hearing protection systems and their influence on localization of warning signals (“Left or right? Level-dependent hearing protectors can alter the sound perception towards the wrong direction”). PD Dr. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth explained how models can be used to predict speech intelligibility with hearing protection systems in various listening conditions (“Measuring and modeling speech intelligibility in listening conditions with level-dependent hearing protection devices”).