Principal Investigator | Assistant Professor

Stacey Kane is the director of the ChARM Lab at the University of Maryland. She is an audiologist and hearing scientist specializing in pediatric auditory skill development. She earned her Doctorate of Audiology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 and practiced as a pediatric clinician and researcher. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024. Dr. Kane’s research focuses on the perceptual, linguistic, and developmental factors affecting how children, particularly those with hearing loss, develop auditory skills such as localization and speech perception in noisy environments.

See Dr. Kane's CV

Dr. Kane is involved in several training programs at the University of Maryland:

Research, Equity, and Access in Communication and Hearing (UMD REACH) 

Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (C-CEBH)

Program in Neuroscience & Cognitive Science (NACS)

PhD Student | Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Program

AuD Student | Graduate Research Assistant

Joanna Kolker is an Audiology Doctoral Student at the University of Maryland. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences from the University of Missouri in 2020. Prior to her doctoral studies, Joanna worked as an Audiology and Outpatient Assistant at The Treatment and Learning Centers where she gained extensive experience supporting neurodivergent individuals and patients of all ages with hearing loss. Joanna aspires to become a pediatric audiologist. Her doctoral capstone project focuses on pediatric speech-in-noise perception by analyzing how vowel-consonant relationships influence sentence recognition in background noise.

AuD Student | Graduate Research Assistant

Vanessa Reyes is a graduate student in the Doctor of Audiology program at the University of Maryland. Her clinical interests include working with pediatric and cochlear implant patients. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Hearing and Speech Sciences from the University of Maryland in 2025. As a member of the first ever REACH cohort at the University of Maryland, she conducted research on temporal processing and speech perception in adult cochlear implant users. She was also a member of the UMD Hearing and Speech Sciences Honors Program, where she earned High Honors for her thesis, Age-Related Temporal Processing Deficits: The Relationship Between Gap Detection and Temporal Cue Discrimination. Her current research interests include a focus on masked speech recognition in bilingual children and cochlear implant users. 

Undergraduate Research Assistant | HESP Honors Student

Renée Christie is a third-year Psychology and Hearing and Speech Sciences major. She is a HESP honors student and a member of the third REACH cohort. She is interested in researching how the use of different auditory cues develops throughout childhood.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Undergraduate Research Assistant