Fatima T. Husain

Fatima Husain says she took the “scenic route” to her current positions as Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illinois and Beckman Institute faculty member.

While growing up in India, Husain had dreams of being a writer, but an aptitude for science put her on a different academic path. Still, she says, she never lost her interest in how people express themselves.

“I love languages and everybody in India is multi-lingual,” said Husain, who speaks five languages herself. “It’s quite easy for me to learn a new language. If I’m going to travel in a country I can memorize a phrasebook very quickly to at least speak some sentences.”

Part of her interest in language was in learning how it is people acquire the spoken and written word.

“How does the brain make sense of this, how do we acquire language, how do we learn a new language as infants and as we grow older?” Husain asked rhetorically. “It always fascinated me because I wanted to be a novelist or a poet. Words always moved me, language always moved me. But I was good with math and science so the push was always to go toward that rather than the liberal arts.”

Husain’s undergraduate degree was in engineering, but her interest in language and the process of language acquisition led her to pursue a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University.

“When I was doing my master’s in computer science I realized that I really wanted to understand how language works from inside the brain,” Husain said. “Because I was from engineering and not the biological sciences, I wasn’t sure how to get into neuroscience. A natural segue was to study computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. The department at Boston University at that time in 1995 was one of few that focused on that kind of work.”

Husain, a member of Beckman’s Human Perception and Performance group, has a research focus on auditory, speech, and language processing in the brain using neuroimaging (fMRI) and computational modeling techniques. She said the methods aren’t as important as the subjects she studies.

“My overarching goal is to understand how the brain works and I use different tools to get there,” Husain said. “I use computer modeling, behavioral experiments, and fMRI experiments right now but I imagine using other tools in the future. My goal is to understand how the brain works, specifically, in the domains of language, speech, and hearing.”

Husain’s research career began to truly take flight while she was working at the National Institutes of Health as a research scientist, creating computer models for understanding auditory and speech processing. It was while at NIH that she presented an idea to her mentor about studying tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. She had been going to programs and conferences to give talks about her computer models and took in presentations about tinnitus.

“I had been thinking about it for a very long time,” Husain said of the tinnitus study. “I said ‘wait a minute I can give tinnitus to my model’ and I went back and did that on my own time. I had been researching on my own and finally I was in a position to conduct research and get a grant. That was important because nobody at the NIH intramural program was doing research on tinnitus before I got there.”

Using computer models from her previous work, combined with fMRI data, Husain was able to look at the problem of tinnitus in a new way.

“This is the only model I know of from a cerebral cortex perspective,” she said. “I’m trying to study auditory processing disorders with this, especially disorders which have a lot of complexity and that we don’t understand as much.”

In order to create a model for studying tinnitus, Husain took her models of auditory processing and perturbed them to reflect the effects of the hearing disorder. Her innovative computer model was able to provide new insight into tinnitus.