Sandra Gordon-Salant, PhD

Dr. Sandy Gordon-Salant personifies the scholarly accomplishments of this award’s namesake. Following receipt of her PhD in audiology from Northwestern University, Dr. Gordon-Salant headed to her first faculty position at the University of Maryland, where she has remained ever since. While there, she rose through the ranks and soon became the mainstay of that university’s audiology program, both as a researcher and a teacher. Despite a varied and demanding teaching load, as well as numerous administrative or service responsibilities, she was able to develop and sustain an outstanding research career devoted to attaining a better understanding of the auditory perceptual problems experienced by older adults. Dr. Gordon-Salant, working in collaboration with her long-time colleague and friend, Pete Fitzgibbons, was one of the first to clearly establish that older adults have great difficulty processing rapid sounds, including time-compressed or rapidly articulated speech. More importantly, she was able to demonstrate that such difficulties were age related and not just a simple consequence of peripheral hearing loss. The excellence of her programmatic research in these areas was recognized recently by the National Institute on Aging when her grant application received a prestigious MERIT award, adding an additional five years of NIH support to her funded five-year application. Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than Dr. Gordon-Salant’s great scholarly success is the unassuming manner in which she wears it.