Meike Brockmann-Bauser is Head of Research and Professional Head of Speech Pathology Section, Department of Phoniatrics and Speech Pathology, Clinic for Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. She trained as speech therapist in Germany and Switzerland and received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Great Britain.

My interest in medicine and language is inherent to diagnostic questions in human voice disorders, and focuses on how to differentiate normal physiologic from pathologic acoustic voice deviation. Such as in the projects “Effect of vocal intensity and fundamental frequency on Cepstral Peak Prominence and Spectral Slope in women with and without voice disorders” and “Studying the behavior of acoustic measures of the PRAAT program in voice evaluation” we investigate confounding factors in software based instrumental acoustic voice measurements recommended as standard in voice diagnostics. In a clinical context these analysis techniques are used to objectively describe voice sound deviation (i.e. dysphonia), to supplement diagnosis and to describe treatment outcomes. Similar techniques are also widely applied to describe differences between languages and dialects, or in speaker identification.

Also, our Phoniatrics and Speech Pathology research group focuses on adapting symptom specific questionnaires for voice and swallowing disorders to the German language, such as in the project “Transcultural translation and validation of the German Vocal Fatigue Index (VFI)”, and on describing swallowing disorders in patients with head and neck tumors. Both research areas are multidisciplinary in nature, involving collaborative work with specialists from medicine, biomedical sciences and medical physics, linguistics including phonetics, psychology and special pedagogics.