We are proud to introduce so many very distinguished
speakers within the field of children and hearing impairment/deafness:
Wednesday:
| ► Hans Rosling | ► Amy McConkey Robbins | ► Suzanne Harrigan | ► Pamela Talbot |
2. Many Asian countries are now improving twice as fast as Europe ever did.
3. A new gap may form between 5 billion people moving towards healthy lives with education, cell phones, electricity, washing machines and health service and more than 1 billion people stuck in the vicious circle of absolute poverty and disease.
4. So far all progress towards health and wealth has been achieved at the price of increased CO2 emission that drives the imminent climate crisis.
5. There are reasons for optimism regarding the future of the world because the world is so poorly governed at present. Hence we have enormous opportunities to improve the life of all humans by turning our already converging world into an equal, secure, sustainable and free place to live in.
Hans Rosling is professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, the medical university in Stockholm, Sweden. When working as a young doctor in Mozambique he discovered a previously unrecognized paralytic disease that his research team named Konzo. His 20 years of research on global health concerned the character of the links between economy and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
He has been adviser to WHO and UNICEF, co-founded Médecines sans Frontiers in Sweden and started new courses and published a textbook on Global Health. He is a member of the International Group of the Swedish Academy of Science and of the Global Agenda Network of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
He co-founded Gapminder Foundation (www.gapminder.org) with son and daughter in-
law. Gapminder promotes a fact based world view by converting the international statistics into moving, interactive, understandable and enjoyable graphics. This was first done by developing the Trendalyzer software that Google acquired in 2007. Using animations of global trends, Hans Rosling lectures about past and contemporary economic, social and environmental changes in the world and he produces thematic videos using the same technique. His award-winning lectures on global trends have been labeled “humorous, yet deadly serious” and many in the audience realize their own world view is lagging many decades.
Hans Rosling’s 5 points on global trends are:
1. There are no longer two types of countries in the world, the old division into industrialized and developing countries has been replaced by 192 countries on a continuum of socio-economic development.
Amy McConkey Robbins is a speech-language pathologist and a certified Auditory Verbal Therapist (cert AVT) in Indianapolis, Indiana and the author of evaluation procedures commonly used with deaf children. She has authored over 70 publications, including a speech/music curriculum, TuneUps, that recently received the “Most-Valuable-Product” award by clinicians.
Her work has focused on family-centered early intervention, on oral bilingual families and on techniques to enhance higher-order thinking skills in deaf children.
She is the author of Whirlwinds and Small Voices: Sustaining Commitment to work with Special-Needs Children, co-written with Clarence McConkey. She serves on journal editorial boards and national policy committees.
Amy recently was named a distinguished alumna of Purdue University for her contributions to the field of pediatric cochlear implantation. In addition to her therapy with children and families, Ms. Robbins consults with schools and teaches internationally, including in Latin America where she grew up.
She worked previously at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Boys Town National Research Hospital, and as a consultant for 3M-International in Brussels, Belgium.
She received a BA in psychology from Hollins College, Virginia, a Diploma in Phonetics and Linguistics at Leeds University, Yorkshire, England and a Master of Science in Audiology and Speech Sciences from Purdue University.
Pamela Talbot is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist, specialized in hearing loss. She holds certification as a Teacher of the Hearing-Impaired and Auditory-Verbal Therapist.
She has extensive experience working with children who have severe-profound hearing impairment and cochlear implants and their families.
Pamela has served as consultant to regular education teachers, therapists and administrators as well as schools for the deaf related to auditory-oral program development. She has been training professionals and parents at an international level for the past 25 years. Pamela is also co-founder of a new company called Language Launchers Inc,
Suzanne Harrigan is a specialist speech and language therapist, who has been working in the field of childhood deafness for 20 years, firstly on the Nottingham Paediatric Cochlear Implant Programme and then at The Ear Foundation, where she takes the lead in providing pre-school services to young deaf children and their families.
Suzanne is particularly interested in supporting family communication using hearing technology. She has worked with families of children with a variety of complex needs, including Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy and learning disability. She is particularly interested in using qualitative research methods to understand the views of parents in order to shape clinical practise.
