Wafaa Kaf, MBBCh, MSc, PhD

Wafaa Kaf, MBBCh, MSc, PhD, is a professor of audiology, Communication Sciences and Disorders Department at Missouri State University (MSU). Dr. Kaf earned both her MBBCh degree in medicine and surgery and a master’s in audiology during her medical residency at the Ear, Nose, Throat Department, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut, Egypt.

In 2003, Dr. Kaf obtained her PhD in audiology from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was the program coordinator of the doctor of audiology program at MSU for seven years. Dr. Kaf’s primary research interests are in the areas of early auditory evoked potentials to assess hearing thresholds using ABR and ASSR, to study inner ear and neural adaptation of the auditory nerve using ECochG and ABR with CLAD technique in Ménière’s disease and cochlear synaptopathy, and to investigate hyperacusis in ASD and migraine in humans and preclinical model.

Dr. Kaf’s additional research interest includes wideband acoustic immittance measurements in normal and pathological middle ear. Dr. Kaf has more than 130 research publications and presentations at both national and international conferences. She has been invited as a distinguished speaker at several international conferences in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt. In 2014, she was invited as a researcher to present her research and collaborate with faculty at the Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain, and as a visiting scholar at the EMCL program in Joensuu, Finland (2014).

Dr. Kaf is an outstanding faculty and researcher. At MSU, she was awarded two Foundation Awards for Excellence in both Teaching (2009) and Research (2017), the Director’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Research, Honors College (2016), was named as an accomplished professor (2019) and an outstanding faculty mentor in the MSU Bear Bridge Mentoring Program (2021). Regionally, she was awarded the Margo Skinner Award for Outstanding Audiologist in Missouri, Missouri Academy of Audiology (2009). Nationally, she was featured on the Hearing Health Magazine, WebMD Connect to Care, and Internationally at the Audiology Worldnews, respectively.

Dr. Kaf’s service to the profession is extensive and includes program chair of the AAA 2022+HearTECH Expo, audiology chair of the Missouri Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention (2018-2020), and president of the Missouri Academy of Audiology (2015- 2017) (elected president, president, and past president). She also has served at several roles at previous Academy and ASHA Committees and is an expert reviewer at several professional journals and textbooks.

Because of Dr. Kaf’s research expertise, she was selected by ASHA to provide a critical peer-review of the Clinical Practice Guidelines: Ménière’s Disease that was developed by the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, and she was invited by the Hearing Health Foundation to provide a live webinar about Meniere’s disease.