MORE ABOUT US

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 the Karolinska Institute 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.

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. Parallel to this, 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.

Martin Dahlquist has an MSc in Electrical Engineering from KTH, Stockholm, Sweden.  After graduation in 1978 he has been working as an engineer at the Manilla School for deaf children in Stockholm, followed by engagement at KTH in Department of Speech, Music and Hearing.

After that he has been working clinically as a hearing engineer, first at Södersjukhuset, Stockholm and later at Karolinska University Hospital.

In April 2013 he started working at ORCA Europe as a Research Engineer.

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.