Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences PhD Candidate Defne Abur Awarded NIH Grant

Defne Abur, a Sargent College PhD candidate in Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences and graduate student fellow at BU’s Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH/NIDCD) for her work “motor phenotypes of Parkinson’s disease (postural instability and gait or tremor-dominant Parkinson’s).” Abur is a doctoral research assistant in Sargent’s Stepp Lab for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation Engineering where her work focuses on auditory factors in voice and speech production, autophonic judgments of voice, and the use of auditory perturbation paradigms to study speech and voice motor control. 

Abur had previously been awarded a New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarships from the ASHFoundation.