Dr. Simonyan is Named Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School and Mass Eye and Ear | November 1, 2022
Congratulations to Kristina Simonyan, MD, PhD, Dr med, who has been promoted to Professor of OHNS at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
Dr. Simonyan,director of Laryngology Research at Mass Eye and Ear, is world-renowned for her research on complex speech and motor behaviors in healthy individuals and patients with neurological voice and speech disorders, such as laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor.
Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Simonyan is credited with developing a robust deep-learning platform for the automatic diagnosis of dystonia, identifying and studying the first oral drug for the treatment of alcohol-responsive laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor and—most recently—implementing a novel brain-computer interface-based intervention for dystonia rehabilitation.
Since 2008, her research has continuously been funded by multiple R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health. Last year, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders awarded Dr. Simonyan an $11.7 million P50 Clinical Research Center Grant to launch and lead a new, multi-institutional center committed to conducting research on laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor.
“Dr. Simonyan has already helped shape the worldwide discussion on dystonia and tremor, and her future work is poised to deliver diagnostic and therapeutic breakthroughs that could forever change outcomes for patients debilitated by these conditions,” said Mark A. Varvares, MD, FACS, Chief of OHNS at Mass Eye and Ear and Chair of OHNS at HMS. “We take great pride in Dr. Simonyan’s work and the impact it one day might have on thousands of people suffering from neurological voice disorders.”