Call Now: 602-307-9919

Dr. Jason Galster – Research and Advancements in Hearing Technology

 In Podcast
Dr. Jason Galster

Dr. Jason Galster is a recognized leader in hearing loss and cochlear implants. He currently serves as the Director of Clinical Research at Advanced Bionics, a company that offers advanced cochlear implants for adults and children alike. He’s also an Adjunct Professor at Salus University and Nova Southeastern University.

Dr. Galster is known for his innovation and research in audiology, starting his career back in 1999 as a research assistant. He refined his approach over a decade at Starkey Hearing Technologies, working as the Senior Manager of Audiology Research.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

  • How Dr. Jason Galster went from working on car stereos to renowned audiologist
  • Setting the standards for audiology and cochlear implants
  • Upcoming developments to cochlear implants and hearing technology
  • Audiologic vs. subjective satisfaction in hearing loss patients
  • Dr. Galster talks about the advances in connectivity for cochlear implants and hearing aids
  • Will there be cochlear implants without external ports?
  • What Dr. Galster learned from his mentors

In this episode…

Both hearing aids and cochlear implants have gone through leaps and bounds of improvement in the past two decades. The archaic, clunky hearing aids of yesteryear are giving way to discreet, efficient models. Even cochlear implants are being made more comfortable and convenient for patients. 

Leading the charge for these developments are companies like Advanced Bionics that create state-of-the-art cochlear implants. Their research team has been working hard to make these advancements, and they’re here to share what they’ve found.

On this episode of the ListenUp! podcast, Dr. Mark Syms invites Dr. Jason Galster, the Director of Clinical Research at Advanced Bionics, to discuss the development of cochlear implant technology. Dr. Galster discusses the need for standards in audiology to create a baseline for proper hearing. He then goes into detail about possible advancements on the horizon, including research on hearing aids and implants. They also take time to talk about Dr. Galster’s career and the mentors he’s had along the way.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by the Arizona Hearing Center.

The Arizona Hearing Center is a cutting-edge hearing care facility providing comprehensive, family-focused care. Approximately 36 million Americans suffer from some sort of hearing loss, more than half of whom are younger than the age of 65. That’s why the team at the Arizona Hearing Center is focused on providing the highest-quality care using innovative technologies and inclusive treatment plans. 

As the Founder of the Arizona Hearing Center, Dr. Mark Syms is passionate about helping patients effectively treat their hearing loss so that they can stay connected with their family and friends and remain independent. He knows first-hand how hearing loss can impact social connection and effective communication. By relying on three core values—empathy, education, and excellence—Dr. Syms and his team of hearing loss experts are transforming the lives of patients. 

So what are you waiting for? Stop missing out on the conversation and start improving your quality of life today!  

To learn more about the Arizona Hearing Center, visit https://www.azhear.com/ or call us at 602-307-9919. We don’t sell hearing aids—we treat your hearing loss.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:04  

Welcome to the ListenUp! podcast where we explore hearing loss communication, connections and health.

Dr. Mark Syms  0:15  

Dr. Mark Syms here, I’m the host of ListenUp! podcast where we feature leaders in healthcare. This episode is brought to you by Arizona Hearing Center, I help patients to effectively treat their hearing loss so they can remain independent and be better socially connected. The reason I’m so passionate about hearing loss is because I lost my brother Robbie twice. I lost him first to the hearing loss that he developed in his 20s from radiation to his brain tumor, and then subsequently from complications from that. I am the E of ENT I only do yours I’ve performed over 10,000 year surgeries and I take care of people with hearing loss all the time. I’m excited to for us to talk about this today. If you want to learn anything more about my clinical practice, go to www.azhear.com, or you can learn more about my book, Listen Up: A Physician’s Guide to Effectively Treating Your Hearing Loss at www.listenuphearing.com. I’m really excited today. We have an excellent guest today we have Dr. Jason Galster. He is a PhD in audiology electrical engineering. He got his undergraduate degree in his master’s from Purdue. He got his PhD from Vanderbilt. We’re going to talk about that. And he is now the director clinical research at Advanced Bionics. We’re really excited to have him here. Thank you for being on this show today.

Dr. Jason Galster  1:30  

Thank you for having me, Dr. Syms. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Mark Syms  1:33  

Mark is great. So it’s good. So tell. Tell me about your journey, your journey to audiology and hearing science. As you get it. I told you mine. I had a brother in hearing loss. How’d you get it? 

Dr. Jason Galster  1:45  

Yeah, good. Thank you for asking the question. For me, it’s been a lifelong journey I had. Even when I was a teenager, I got my first car. And I was one of those obnoxious 16 year olds driving down the street with a car that you could hear before you could see it. And this was because I was installing car stereos in the trunk of my car and my friend’s car fires. And even when I was 16, I realized acoustics were interesting. And unfortunately today, I still have some rigging and this year to credit to that hobby. So I don’t advise it. But you do you do silly things when you’re a teenager. But that really developed my interest in acoustics, I realized you could build a box, you can have a speaker in that box. And just by drilling holes in it or changing your your port, you could really change the way the sound quality, you know, you could change your sound quality. So I went into college with this interest in sound and found initially acoustical engineering, which as a career path ultimately didn’t feel that exciting because I knew I would be designing boxes for the rest of my life for various acoustic purposes. And I really enjoyed working with people. I always enjoyed working with people. And I was looking for a career path that involve people. And in some way acoustics and audiology, interestingly meshes those two things perfectly. So when I discovered audiologist audiology as an undergrad, it was like flipping a light switch for me. And I saw this path. And since then, I’ve known exactly the direction I wanted to go and exactly what my mission was. And so really, that led me straight into audiology with the technical interest or research interest into clinical interest. And so if you if you start there, it made a lot of sense how I found my way to audiology, but also how I really stayed with the technical lien with an interest in in research. So even though I’ve spent some time in the clinic to sort of hone those skills and understand the environment, I’ve always had a technical focus and a research focus. It took me from my undergrad to my my graduate experience, then to pediatric audiology, for a period of time, and then to my my Ph. D. program at Vanderbilt. And after an excellent experience at Vanderbilt, where I learned a great deal from wonderful people. I then went on to begin my life in technology development. And so I worked with Starkey Hearing Technologies for about a decade, developing new to world hearing aid technology and extending my time researching hearing aids for about 20 years total looking all the way back into my academic life. And then, about about three years ago, I started to realize that and I love I loved working with hearing aids, I still love working with hearing aids and hearing loss is a big driver for me helping to treat it. But I realized about about three years ago that I wanted to become broadened my horizon while still focusing on this passion, and, and that really helped me pivot a bit, find my way into cochlear implants. And so for the last three years, I’ve been working in cochlear implant technology development, which really is my first introduction to the world of surgical intervention, and all of the really interesting topics that come along for that, but an entire new realm of technology development and, and research. And today, I have responsibility for clinical trials of new technology across the United States in North America, responsibility for clinical researchers around the world, and new technology development as well. So I’m getting to see some of these earliest clinical outcomes, as soon as we begin to think and realize the feasibility of something new.

Dr. Mark Syms  5:49  

Well, that’s great. I mean, you know, what I say is, I’m a clinician who’s trying to catch up and learn more about audiology and acoustic not that I don’t fully understand it, but there’s always concepts that are for me to learn more. So that’s really great. And, you know, for the listeners here, one of the things is, the outside part of a cochlear implant is oftentimes a modified hearing aid platform. In other words, using a lot of the technology and hearing aids are used in nuclear location. And in particular, for the company that Jason works for Advanced Bionics. its parent company is a hearing aid organization. So they have a lot of sharing of technologies, because they can use the developments and other parts of their company, for the overall organization within Advanced Bionics. So that’s kind of a really cool, cool thing. Well, you know, my second question was going to be, how did you get into cochlear implants? But you actually already answered it. So that’s really great. Tell me, you know, one of the things we were talking about in the warm up was, you’re also involved in creating standards. That’s another one of your passions. So tell me a little about how you got there and what you’re working on?

Dr. Jason Galster  6:55  

Absolutely. So I mentioned that, that I had this short stint as a pediatric cardiologist. And when I went into my Ph. D program, which would have been the mid to late Well, before, mid, I was gonna say mid to late 2000s, if that makes sense. Yeah. But, but I was really focused on classroom acoustics for my dissertation. And as soon as I started my career, I gotten involved in a guide guidelines development group for a standard on pediatric amplification, basically, us a standard that says, this is how you should prescribe hearing aids to children. And, and what I found in that effort was that it was really interesting to see how these global experts on a topic could get in a room together and disagree so passionately. And at the end of the day, through that disagreement, you came out, you really reached to the end of that process with this stronger understanding of the fundamentals what in what it means to prescribe a hearing to a child and, and what and so that was pretty early in my in my professional career. And I realized that that experience was a huge growth opportunity. And for me, I learned so much from the other experts in that in that room and in that discussion. But what I’ve seen since then, because that standard was released, I think, in maybe 2012 or so, I’ve seen the the worldwide impact that it has had on the practice of pediatric audiology and how hearing aids are prescribed to children. It’s been so influential on so guiding that, that it has been a motivator to me and to many other people to say, well, we can we can do this. Now there was already an adult standard. But there are many other ways that we can look to standardized practice in audiology and some of our adjacent professions as well. So today, we have, we have standards groups, that function at a country level at a global level. Some of them are with National Academies. Some of them are independent, some of them are related to organizations, you yourself, had mentioned that you have some guidelines that are specific to your practice, which is excellent. I wish I heard that more often. But but ultimately doing any work that you can to drive a common understanding of what the standard of clinical practice should be is is tremendously influential, and that’s within audiology or anything else. So that’s been a that’s been a big part of what has motivated me to contribute to this. And today, we’re seeing new standards in cochlear implantation and how we ought to logically prescribe the cochlear implant. We’re seeing new standards in pediatric amplification, adult amplification, we have standards and how assistive technology is is fit as well. So There’s a great amount of work going on in this area. And I’m, I’m excited to see it develop.

Dr. Mark Syms  10:04  

Yeah, I find it’s it does two things. One is, is obviously it does great clinical standard. But the other thing is, is what it also does is it makes you really define terms that we all use that we don’t necessarily all, when we use a term, we don’t all we’re all not necessarily speaking about the exact same thing when we use that term. So things enter into our practice, or our our literature or whatever you want to get to our fields that aren’t always defined where people are actually talking about the same thing. So it’s pretty hard to do research and move the field forward, if we’re all using a word or terms that don’t mean the same thing to everybody. And so I think that’s another great thing. And I’m sure that’s probably a part of what you experienced when you were working on these guidelines with the people that vocabulary is the commonality. First thing you have to come by. It’s an interesting process.

Dr. Jason Galster  10:53  

Absolutely. Coming to that common language isn’t a nice isn’t always an easy thing. But it but it’s part of it, it’s part of every one of these standards. And then you can see these terms sort of feed forward and show up in other publications and books like like the ones you’ve written. But yeah, it’s it’s hugely, hugely beneficial. But if we also think about access to technology, and reimbursement

Dr. Mark Syms  11:17  

to see the care to talk to reimbursement and insurance, right, if you’re again, they’ll just say, well, we don’t know what this means. So we’re not going to cover it. I mean, that’s kind of the end to get good clinical outcomes. Again, you have to have the same definition of a political entity which are trying to change.

Dr. Jason Galster  11:33  

Yeah, you’re exactly right. I, I think there’s a there’s actually an unfortunate example, recently, where the National Academies of Science, I’m not sure if you saw the press releases about this, but the National Academies of Science looked at the existing evidence for screening of adult hearing loss.

Dr. Mark Syms  11:53  

Oh, yeah. into the annual examination, and they said there wasn’t enough evidence. Which, like, from a clinician point of view, you’re like, really, you know, it’s hard to believe that. 

Dr. Jason Galster  12:04  

I, you and 10s of 1000s of other people around the world saw that and said, How could they possibly arrive at that, at that conclusion. But when you go into the literature, and you look at the the true, truly high impact, peer reviewed evidence, it’s understandable how the expert panel arrived at that conclusion, to not recommend hearing as a part of our hearing screening, specifically, as a part of every annual medical evaluation starting, I think it was at about 50 years of age, there’s a recommendation to do this later in life, but not not quite that young. But when you do look at the evidence, it’s understandable how they arrived at that conclusion. And I’m happy to say that that conclusion at the level of the National Academy is going to motivate a tremendous amount of research in this area, and we will see the evidence develop. But it’s a really good example and pointed one in recent time, where if we had standards and guidelines earlier, that were substantiated by the evidence, who wouldn’t be in the same position?

Dr. Mark Syms  13:10  

Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes, belts and suspenders kind of research is not as interesting for people as well, right. And so that’s kind of, you know, really foundational work that I think is highly impactful, but maybe not as flashy as some people want their research to be. But that’s great, because sometimes, you need kind of a little bit of splat, you know, classical water thrown in your face, to get you to understand that it’s important. So you’re in the cochlear implant world, and you’re doing clinical research. So, you know, just to look at speculation, which is always fun. Where do you see koplayer implants or the field 510 and 25 years from now? Right. So it’s like, what are the, you know, upcoming, the changes and developments? What are the little longer midterm and long term developments? Where do you see things though?

Dr. Jason Galster  14:00  

Yeah, absolutely. I to, to look to the future. I think it helps to put some context in the past. And if we stopped when we think about cochlear implants, and, and, and the history of cochlear implants. It’s a technology that’s only been around now for about 30 years. And is that really mainstream for 20? I mean, yeah, exactly. So we start to think about mainstream mainstream technology with the current, we’ll say, let’s say patient population for about 20 years. And if we look at at this time period going from, will it work 30 years ago to oh my gosh, yes, it works. And it starts to work at really large scale, you know, in this 20 year time frame. If we look back at that history to where we are today. What’s fascinating is that the consistency and the quality of outcomes that we see inpatients days really amazing. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I came from such a long history in hearing aids, that admittedly and shame on me of it. But admittedly, I didn’t have a really clear view to cochlear implant outcomes when I was focused all day, every day on hearing aids. And, and what has been really illuminating to me over these last three years is just the quality and again, the consistency of outcomes with the cochlear implant patient, and how many people there are, who are getting by quite well with hearing aids. But truly, their outcomes could go to that another go to another level and the quality, their quality of life could even really improved substantially if they consider cochlear implantation as a treatment as well. And so, when I look backwards today, how we’ve sort of taking that variability of patient outcomes and brought it into this range of pretty high quality, I think, is what impresses me the most and ideologically, what has surprised me as I’ve gotten really close to it. Now, when I look forward to 5 15 20 20 years, there’s, there’s no doubt that I expect that consistency of outcomes to continue to get better. And for that, for that window of variability to continue to shrink in a positive way.

Dr. Mark Syms  16:27  

So that better prediction of consistent outcomes, right?

Dr. Jason Galster  16:30  

That’s it? That’s exactly exactly right. And I hope that within, say, the next five years or so, well, we’ll be doing a much better job at looking at an individual patient, their demographics, their audiologic information, and being able to say, this is how well we think you’re going to do make a prediction of how well they’re going to do after they have that cochlear implant. That’s something that’s been a real challenge, leading up to today, even though there’s been a lot of research in that area. 

Dr. Mark Syms  17:01  

So I think one of the challenges in that particular space, but your comment is, is audiologic versus subjective satisfaction, right. And so, you know, having done this long enough, there are people who have incredibly excellent audiologic outcomes, who are dissatisfied, and people who have rather mediocre or borderline poor outcomes are incredibly satisfied. And so that psychosocial component is actually another thing that we probably have to go deeper into is to measure people’s not audiologic outcomes, but their satisfaction with the audiologic outcomes. And that, unfortunately, is a little more fuzzy, but it’s actually where we really have to go. And especially I think with payers, you know, talking about insurance reimbursement, I think that that becomes very important. But I’m sorry to interject there. But I think that’s really important. 

Dr. Jason Galster  17:45  

No, you’re exactly right. And I think that’s specifically one of the areas where we’ll get better at considering that in counseling people in predicting their their global satisfaction, and quality of life is one way of describing a lot of those subjective is the big bucket. Yeah, exactly. So So I see that element, which I think will have really clear clinical value, I see that getting getting better. If we sort of drill down to the tech topics, which are a lot of fun to talk about, you know, we sort of have to break these out into this outside piece that looks like the hearing aid, what we call the sound processor. And then we have the internal component like the like the electrode. And so when when you look at the internal piece, that surgical piece, there’s a very clear path, that the that the electrode, the piece that goes into your hearing organ, the cochlea, that that is going to get smaller and smaller that it’s going to get easier to put into the cochlea. And that’s what we would describe as you know, as less traumatic, which means that when you when you’re able to put something in the in the cochlea, and you cause the cochlea, less trauma, that means that all of the structures within that cochlea that help you hear, even with when you have hearing loss and have some hearing leftover, that residual hearing, we do expect these electrodes to get progressively less traumatic, do a better job at keeping those structures in place. And then also preserving that hearing that that people went into the the surgical, you know, into the surgery went right and, and so and we and we know from from years of research that a cochlear implant patient who has some leftover acoustic hearing, we know that they’ll tend to do better in their outcomes, better speech recognition, better satisfaction, and in some cases, they’ll have an opportunity to listen both electrically and acoustically on the same year.

Dr. Mark Syms  19:50  

Yeah, no, that’s great. And so that might be five years still, are we looking at 10 years?

Dr. Jason Galster  19:56  

We’ll see consistent steps in that progression. So we’ll definitely see steps within the five year timeframe that will help. Yeah, that will help to be less a traumatic at the time of insertion, we’ll also see steps in or even taking steps today that can help provide feedback during the surgery related to how you’re interacting with the structures of the cochlea. So we can measure the response of the cochlea during the surgery. And we can actually say if the responses is decreasing in terms of hearing ability, and so all of these things will very likely help to improve surgical technique. And then the advances in technology will also help to improve the the manner in which the electrode sits in the cochlea, and hopefully that will be less a chromatic, so we have better outcomes. Because of that, if we continue to look in the future, we’ll see combination devices where there’s a drug treatment that’s applied to the electrode that may help with healing may help reduce some of the initial trauma by easing the electrode insertion. And so if we follow that trajectory down the path, a lot of this comes back to easier electrode insertion, really a healthier placement of the electrode, and all of that nets, better hearing outcomes, just based on the electrode position in the ear.

Dr. Mark Syms  21:21  

And the outside part is as as hearing aids continue to advance, obviously, cochlear implants well, like so connectivity is really been a big thing because hearing aids have become more connected. So the cochlear implants are more connected. Where else do you see that going?

Dr. Jason Galster  21:36  

Yeah, so so it’s absolutely the case that hearing aid technology is going to drive a good portion of the cochlear implant technology from a sound processing perspective, that outside device in the future, the hearing aid companies move extremely quickly. And the cochlear implant companies get to benefit from from those advancements. So what we’ll see specifically is better leveraging when people are wearing a device on both ears, whether it’s to cochlear implants, or a cochlear implant and a hearing aid, we’re gonna see this wireless technology, better processing noise, better processing speech, to make speech more accessible, we’re gonna see better wireless connectivity to everything around us, including remote microphones that are really fantastic at picking up speed to long distance away.

Dr. Mark Syms  22:26  

What about bi-cross is that coming.

Dr. Jason Galster  22:28  

And we’ll also see, we’ll also definitely continue to see advances in cross technology where if someone can’t hear on one year, but they’re implanted on this year, we can beam that speech around the head, overcome the head shadow effect, that will definitely that will definitely be on the horizon and has existed previously. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the electrical cochlear implant technologies are going to advance as well. So there’s an entire opportunity, as we look in this five and 10 year timeframe, to leverage technologies related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, to make what we call a coding strategy, which is how we electrically stimulate the cochlea, we’re absolutely seeing opportunities to make these coding strategies better. by advancing the technology, leveraging machine learning techniques, leveraging art of artificial intelligence, we can also use those same techniques to work on de noising speech so that when it reaches that electrical coding stage, that speech is better preserved, that it’s cleaner. And then the coding strategy, of course, is more effective, because it’s operating on a nice clean impact speech signal. But we do see ways to make coding strategies lower power, give you you know, really extend the battery life without increasing battery size. But also just making sound continuing to drive sound quality forward, continuing to drive, speech, understanding and sound access forward as well.

Dr. Mark Syms  24:02  

Yeah, I always tell patients, they should thank God for cell phone technology, because boy, cell phone technologies pushed all of this stuff battery life, you know, miniaturization all that stuff? I mean, not that the hearing aids and cochlear implant world don’t want to but it’s really that direct to consumer large market that’s driven a lot of these innovations. So how about a totally implantable everybody always asked me that where do you see that? I only implantable cochlear implant without an external port.

Dr. Jason Galster  24:29  

Yeah, I believe that we will most certainly see cochlear or fully implantable cochlear implant systems where there’ll be nothing more on the outside of the head. There are a great deal of hurdles that need to be overcome. To get there. You need to understand where you going to put a battery inside the body. And of course, there’s precedent for placing batteries down here and you’d have to think about running the battery lead up up the neck, the cochlear implant system So there are paths to do this. It’s being explored. There’s a lot of research and technology development going on in this area. So we’ll definitely, in the future, see fully implantable cochlear implant systems that said there will very likely be trade offs that are made.

Dr. Mark Syms  25:19  

Performance or, or size or something because the batteries larger or reoperation to change battery or something,

Dr. Jason Galster  25:28  

You’re exactly right, it’s very likely that the total surgical procedure will be a bit more complicated, which we would expect. And then there are some convenience trade offs. So for instance, you’d question whether or not you’d have any wireless connectivity, right? For a fully implantable system, you’d you’d question the nature of the microphone where it’s placed, and there’d be some limitations related to some of the helpful sound cleaning technologies we have with the external sound processor.

Dr. Mark Syms  25:58  

Upgrade-ability. Right? So that’s one of the beauties of the external processors, you can upgrade the whole electronics back.

Dr. Jason Galster  26:05  

Right? Exactly. Just like these days, just like there’s always a new cell phone. on the horizon. there’s a there’s a new sound processor on the horizon as well.

Dr. Mark Syms  26:15  

Yeah, that is so true. I mean, I just to contextualize myself, when I first started and cochlear implantation, there were only body processors. So I actually got into CI, right when they were going above the year. Boy, they were a lot bigger. I mean, I know, patients will say to me, can’t you get it smaller is like, Yeah, but it’s pretty amazing how small it is already. So I mean, I’m amazed how far it’s come. So this is all great stuff. So, you know, let me ask questions using like, you know, in terms of, you know, I said, People like, say, you’re going to an awards banquet, you’re getting a Lifetime Achievement Award. Who do you think like, Who are those people that you say, you know, thank you for helping me get here, whoever that is for you?

Dr. Jason Galster  26:53  

Absolutely. I there are a lot of people that I’d like to thank all the time, and I think it changes or based on the based on the day, sometimes you’ll thank one person like your mom, if you just feel like you’re raised well, so thank you, mom. But, uh, but professionally, you know, I do have to recognize my mentor Todd Ricketts. You know, he, I owe him a lot for where I am today and who I am today. He, he, he and I first met when I was an undergrad. And so my entire professional career is is really being mentored by him. Up until my my technology career path in industry. I also have some some folks who I learned a lot from one has been Hornsby. Also, faculty at Vanderbilt then taught me a lot about what what speech means. And how we can study speech as a signal and understanding speech and communication is a fundamental thing. When you think about developing a treatment for hearing.

Dr. Mark Syms  27:58  

What am I trying to hear? In other words, what is it that’s really important?

Dr. Jason Galster  28:02  

Exactly. And if we go back to guidelines, a lot of the guidelines start with the primary goal of the treatment being access to speech, because it’s our mode of communication. So it’s a it’s an underpinning for everything we do. And anytime I’m talking about anything related to hearing loss, I’m always thinking about speech and communication access in the background. And then and then I also have to recognize Wes Grantham, who is a, who is psychoactive station, and West worked in his career. Looking at spatial hearing, so basically, if this one sound is to your left, and one sound is to your right, how do you localize to one sound or the other? And then even even more challenging if two people are talking at you? And you have two overlapping voices? 

Dr. Mark Syms  28:52  

Prioritize and pull them out? Right? 

Dr. Jason Galster  28:54  

Well, I’m happy is this, the attention that you need to pay to a person is a fantastic, really interesting topic. And so what West taught me and, and teaching has always been a, I’ve talked a lot about a lot. I’ve talked about a lot of passions, they all come back to hearing. But I’ve really enjoyed teaching. And I’ve always looked for that opportunity. And I still keep today to adjunct positions, and I teach a few courses a year. And what what Wes taught me that has always been valuable, is he taught me how to look at literature, look at the peer reviewed literature, and then translate that into educational material. Right. That’s excellent. And it’s and it’s one of those things that I honestly, I don’t know, that that would have ever been a fluid behavior for me.

Dr. Mark Syms  29:45  

Definitely something through mentorship, I think, right?

Dr. Jason Galster  29:47  

Yeah. So So all of these folks, I just I credit great way. And then and then there are people who, who have looked at as as leaders like Catherine Palmer, who’s been Just that really clear voice for clinical practice in audiology. And so I have to credit her because she’s the kind of person that you always hear her voice in audiology talking about driving the profession forward. And, and, you know, making sure that we’re coming together and growing. So I have to even though she hasn’t been directly mentoring me as a professor or a teacher, I’m he’s the kind of person that whether or not she knows it, I really look up to her as a mentor.

Dr. Mark Syms  29:50  

That’s great. That’s great. That’s great stuff. Thank you, Jason. Last question. What’s your favorite sound?

Dr. Jason Galster  30:38  

My favorite sound? It is definitely laughter. I and, you know, there, there’s some videos that you watch online, where you’re not laughing, and you don’t know what someone’s laughing at. But there’s something that is human nature that when you’re around somebody who’s laughing, or smiling, or just has that exuding positivity, it, it’s addictive, it just it’s like catching a yawn from someone else. You can almost catch laughter. And so that’s, that’s part of why I think it’s such a phenomenal sound.

Dr. Mark Syms  31:18  

So it’s interesting, dating myself, but Paul Lin, who used to be on Hollywood Squares, he used to get everybody laughing by laughing and I will share with you, that is also when people ask me what my favorite sound is. I always say laughter as well. So you are You and I are similar in that respect. Well, Jason, this has been great. We’ve had that Jason Galster. He’s the director of clinical research at Advanced Bionics. Jason if people want to get a hold of you, how would they do that the website or what would they do?

Dr. Jason Galster  31:45  

I’m always available. My professional email is my name jason.galster@advancedbionics.com

Dr. Mark Syms  31:55  

That’s great. So if anybody has any questions or anything, they want to follow up. Go ahead and reach out to him. Jason, this has been great. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. This has been a really awesome conversation. Thank you so much. 

Dr. Jason Galster  32:07  

Yeah, thank you, Mark. This was a pleasure.

Outro  32:13  

Thanks for tuning in to the ListenUp! podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get updates on future episodes.

Recommended Posts