Summer Adventures: JD Hairston

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JD Hairston is a rising senior majoring in both psychology and speech, language and hearing science. He sat down to talk about his summer adventures!

What are you doing this summer?

I started off the summer by going to the Tinnitus Research Initiative Conference in Vancouver, which is super exciting. That's the whole reason I am in school, trying to learn how to make a difference in the tinnitus world. People who have this ringing in their ears which is super annoying, and there's no cure. There's a lot of mysteries surrounding it. And so to be able to go to this conference where researchers from all around the world were present, and not to mention visiting beautiful Vancouver was awesome.

JD and other participants at the Tinnitus Research Initiative Conference at the University of British Columbia

What are you doing in terms of your tinnitus research?

Personally, I have my own podcast about it. I just threw myself completely in the world of tinnitus research. It has three major avenues of understanding it, and that's the audiological perspective – that's like hearing health and all sorts of stuff. There's a neuroscience and psychological component, because it impacts your thinking and some people have an emotional reaction to it. I guess I always say audiology, neuroscience and psychology. Those are the three avenues. I tried to merge those within the Honors College itself. 

My Honors Thesis is going to be investigating the auditory brainstem response to hearing sounds from different locations with noise. That's research I'm doing as a student, and it's a very dense topic, but the cool thing about it is we're going to be looking at EEG data to see how exactly our brain processes sounds, and where exactly within our auditory pathway we're paying attention to them. 

It's a little removed from tinnitus per se, but it helps to do anything that we can learn that helps us better understand all the mysteries surrounding how we hear things in the world.

How has your thesis process been so far?
It’s a heavy one, but I’ve been loving it. My Principal Investigator (PI) Lisa Sanders has thrown me into the deep end of this very rich subject. I'm knee deep in my literature review, which I've also been doing this summer. I spend about 5 to 15 hours a week trudging through piles of research articles. I mean, I have probably around 50 articles so I'm taking the summer trying to better understand the subject

What skills and experiences have you gained so far in your tinnitus research?

I'm learning so much about how to parse through information. How to pick and choose what is important, how do I apply my own perspective to it and take something meaningful from it. Since the goal at the end of all of this – besides me participating in some potentially exciting discoveries in the realm of science, cognition, and hearing – I think being able to come out on the other end of this with a profound understanding of something that I had no idea was so complicated before.

How is your thesis/research helping you in your future plans?

My ambitions are to make a splash in the world of tinnitus, which affects people all around the world. In order to do so, you need to have a lot of knowledge under your belt. I plan to go on to grad school, and I do think that this research project is helping me develop a lot of skills and tools that will help me as I further my education and try to dig in deeper into these subjects.

How did you develop this interest in tinnitus?
I used to not wear ear protection while making super loud rock music. I gave myself some noise induced hearing loss, but my hearing is still pretty decent. It’s just that I have on top of it this high pitched ringing sound that never goes away. So it became a very personal thing. Like I mentioned earlier, it has a very intense emotional component for a subsection of people who develop it. Maybe you've experienced it yourself after a loud concert or something, some ringing in your ears. Usually it goes away, but all hearing loss and damage to your hair cells in your ears is permanent and cumulative. So for many people, one day you wake up, and it never goes away.

When I developed it, I was taking a break from my career as a chef and restaurant owner during COVID. It wasn't the most fun time to get back into the kitchen.  I thought, man, this ringing in my ears is really bugging me, I want to do something about it. So I started looking around and asking people questions, and started my podcast where I just talked about my experience. I realized that there are people out there doing what I want to be doing in this world, so I'm just going to go do it. Fortunately, I had some early conversations at UMass and at Greenfield Community College, and was able to get in and pick up where I left off my education 20 years ago. I'm just trying to study audiology, neuroscience and psychology and see what I can do to help people who are living with this.

What are you doing to relax this summer?

I’m riding my bike, cooking for friends and family, getting time to hang out with my aging cats, making music and I'll just go try and get some more time in New England!