Prof Talita le Roux
Profile | Pretoria Cochlear Implant Unit | Department
Prof Talita le Roux is an associate professor in Audiology in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in the Faculty of Humanities. She is also involved as an audiologist and researcher at the Pretoria Cochlear Implant Unit. Her cochlear implant (CI) research interests include CI outcomes and predictors of CI outcomes, access to CI care, and person- and family-centred care for pediatric and adult CI recipients.
Prof Johan Hanekom
Profile | Bioengineering | Department
Prof Johan Hanekom is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of EBIT. He is the group head of Bioengineering at UP, is a member of the Pretoria Cochlear Implant Unit, and has been involved with cochlear implants since 1988 when the first House/3M single-channel CIs were implanted in South Africa. His research is centred on understanding the relationship between electrical stimuli, the resulting space-time neural spike train patterns, and perception with a CI. The research involves computer modelling of processing in the central auditory nervous system and psychoacoustics.
Prof Tania Hanekom
Profile | Bioengineering | Department
Prof Tania Hanekom is a professor in the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of EBIT. Her research is in the area of computational physiology of the electrically stimulated human auditory system. The research aims to create user-specific computer models of the auditory periphery of cochlear implant (CI) users to develop clinical tools to allow non-invasive model-based diagnostics and model-predicted customisation of device parameters.
Dr Werner Badenhorst
Profile | Bioengineering | Department
Dr Werner Badenhorst is a lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of EBIT. His research is in conductance-based auditory nerve fibre (ANF) models within finite element models of user-specific models of the cochleae with cochlear implants (CIs). The research investigates how modelling of ANF temporal characteristics and electrically evoked compound potentials can aid in improving the performance of individual CI performance.
Dr Rene Human-Baron
Profile | Anatomy | Department
Dr Rene Human-Baron is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anatomy in the School of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences. Her research is in the morphology of the human cochlea and neighbouring structures as derived from different imaging modalities. Her research contributes to the computational modelling work done by the team by quantifying anatomical details of the human cochlea and neighbouring structures. In this way, the development of clinical tools to construct person-specific cochlear models is facilitated.
Dr Celesté Pretorius
Dr Celesté Pretorius is a lecturer in the Department of Radiography in the School of Health Care Sciences at the University of Pretoria. She has extensive clinical experience in CT, MRI, and fMRI, having worked in both the UK and South Africa. Her doctoral research, completed in the Department of Communication Pathology at the University of Pretoria, was conducted within a transdisciplinary team and investigated auditory system function in HIV-positive patients using fMRI. Dr Pretorius developed and optimised CT and MRI protocols, and also scanned CI patients in clinical settings. Her teaching and research focus on advancing radiography education, integrating multimodality imaging, and contributing to the development of imaging support for CI patients.