MEET US

Karolina Smeds

Karolina Smeds has an MSc in Engineering Physics from KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, and an MSc in Audiology from the University of Southampton, Great Britain. She has been working as an engineer at the Manilla School for deaf children in Stockholm and has been lecturing at the Audiology program at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. At the audiology program she has been responsible for technically oriented courses such as physics, signals and systems, psychoacoustics, hearing aid technology and hearing aid fitting.

Karolina Smeds carried out her PhD work at KTH under the supervision of professor Arne Leijon and in 2004 she got her PhD with the thesis, “Less is more? Loudness aspects of prescriptive methods for nonlinear hearing aids”. Prescriptive methods were evaluated for hearing-impaired people with mild to moderate hearing loss. The main result was that generic prescriptive methods available today generally prescribe higher gain than members of this group of hearing-aid wearers prefer. A summary of the thesis can be found here.

In 2006, when Widex decided to establish the new ORCA Europe research group, Karolina Smeds was asked to be the director.

Josefina Larsson

Josefina Larsson has a BSc in Audiology (Leg. Audionom) from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and a BSc in Phonetics from the Stockholm University.

After graduation in 2003 she started to work clinically with hearing aid rehabilitation at a clinic in Stockholm. She has also been lecturing in audiology diagnostics at the Audiology program at Örebro University and prior to joining the team at ORCA Europe she worked with hearing aid development as a research audiologist at a hearing aid company in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In December 2006 she returned to Stockholm and joined the ORCA Europe research group as a Research Audiologist.

Petra Herrlin

Petra Herrlin has a BSc in Communication disorders from Salem State University (Massachusetts, USA) and a BSc and a MSc in Audiology (Leg. Audionom) from Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

After graduating in 2001, she has been working as a university lecturer at the Audiology program at Karolinska Institutet. At the Audiology program she was responsible for courses such as hearing diagnostics and hearing rehabilitation. Parallel to teaching, she has been working clinically with hearing rehabilitation, focusing on persons with severe/profound hearing loss at a clinic in Stockholm.

In August 2015 she joined the ORCA Europe research group as a Research Audiologist.

Florian Wolters

Florian Wolters has a BEng in Audiology and Hearing Technologies from the University of Applied Sciences in Oldenburg and an Audio Engineering Diploma from the School of Audio Engineering (SAE) in Hamburg.

He joined the ORCA team in August 2009 as a student carrying out his bachelor thesis on objective quality evaluation of noise reduction algorithms.

From February 2010 on, he is integrated in the research group as a Research Engineer.

Sarah Gotowiec

Sarah Gotowiec has an Hon.BSc in Psychology from the University of Toronto (Canada), an MMSc. in Public Health from Lund University (Sweden), and a PhD in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences from Aarhus University (Denmark).

She has researched in clinical, cognitive, and social psychology, and lectured in statistics and social psychology.

In April 2019, she joined the ORCA Europe research group as a Research Psychologist, where she carries out mixed methods research in the social, psychological, and behavioral aspects of hearing loss.

Frederic Marmel

Frederic Marmel has a PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Lyon (France), which he completed in 2008 under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Tillmann, and which investigated the auditory processing of musical structures. Between 2009 and 2018, Frederic completed a series of postdoctoral research projects in hearing science and audiology, focusing mostly on temporal processing abilities and mechanisms in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, as well as on cochlear synaptopathy.

Frederic then joined the European RUMBLE project that aimed to develop regulations and norms for the low-level sonic booms of the future generation of supersonic aircrafts. This was the opportunity for him to take auditory research methods out of the lab and focus on listeners’ experience in realistic auditory environments.

Frederic joined the ORCA Europe research group in September 2021 as a Research Engineer.