Profile: Dr. Tim Anderson

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in Minnesota in a working class household, with anywhere from one to five siblings under the same roof at any one time.  I knew my parents were not going to be able to help with college so I ended up working lots of odd jobs in high school such as a pizzeria dishwasher, a Burger King night crew member, as a grunt helper installing HVACs, and as a grocery bagger/cashier.  Along the way I was always interested in science and math.  I saved up and bought a Commodore 64 computer.  I then taught myself programming in BASIC and Assembly.

At the time, I seemed to have normal hearing other than an odd case that when I was young, I had some hearing issues that were blamed on a dander allergy, resulting in my family giving away our dog to relatives.  Much later, my wife asked a specialist, who said this was not plausible; we got a dog a few months after that! My hearing loss diagnosis came later in life – when I was already a faculty member.

While I did not grow up on the reservation, I am also a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.  I attended my first American Indian Science and Engineering Society National Conference when it was held in Minnesota, just a few miles from my university. This was my first major conference – something that became a frequent professional experience later.

How did you get to where you are?

I went to the University of Minnesota in electrical engineering and did summer internships along the way in various companies.  As I approached graduation, I had a couple of job offers, but a mentor, Dean Russell Hobbie, gave me an NSF report discussing the impending shortage of Engineering faculty and said that he wanted me to go off, get a PhD and come back to the University to teach.  

On almost a whim, as an undergraduate, I sat for the GRE exam and filled out an application for an NSF graduate fellowship.  Perhaps without the stress of that being a primary plan, I did well enough to be awarded a graduate fellowship.  Using that, I went to Georgia Tech for graduate school.  I wanted a higher, more systems level perspective and switched from electrical engineering to industrial and systems engineering for my Master’s and PhD.  

Upon graduation, in 1995, I joined the faculty at Portland State University.  The culture shock was amazing – I was graduating from the largest industrial engineering department in the country, to become only the second full-time faculty member in a new department.  We worked together to organize international conferences for professionals and academicians. 

In 2006, I reorganized my office.  As a good industrial engineer, I decided the logical thing was to move my phone to my left (non-dominant) side so that I could better take notes while talking on the phone. My first phone call after doing that was clearly a prank.  It sounded like someone was using a bad 1970s era robotic voice like a Speak ‘n Spell toy.  I could understand the words but not recognize the voice.  Moving it to my right ear revealed it was my wife.  Left-Robot; Right-Wife.

At this point, I went down all the usual routes for unilateral hearing loss:  seeing a few specialists; answering questions that might try to explain the difference between ears, such as, “are you a hunter or served in the military?”.  Imaging was done to rule out an acoustic neuroma.  The verdict was “…sorry, but it won’t get better, and is likely to continue degrading.  Come back when it is worse and we’ll see what we can do.”

For ten years, I just dealt with it.  As a professor, I could lecture from the front and just ask students to repeat their questions if I couldn’t make it out.  Research group meetings were under my control and I didn’t even need to consciously think about coping with hearing loss.  Occasional meetings were manageable.  

By 2016 I was now a department chair.  This meant that work had changed from classes, research, and occasional meetings to a near incessant stream of meetings in all kinds of settings.  Small groups, large groups, rooms that were less than ideal, etc.  I found myself needing to show up to meetings 5 minutes early to get a good seat from an auditory perspective. Now I had to guess where the center of conversation would be in the room, where a mumbler with important insights would be, and so on.  Tinnitus had also become a 24×7 unwanted companion – like a fly buzzing that could never be swatted.  

It was finally time to address the hearing problem. I still had normal hearing in my good ear but my bad ear had worsened. The unanimous opinion was that I had blown right past hearing aids being of any help and it was time for something “stronger.”  ENT surgeons were in agreement that if they were in my position, their preferred option would be a cochlear implant, but only if insurance would cover the procedure.  We spent over 3 months of surgeon and patient appeals getting rejected by insurance because the US FDA had not yet approved a cochlear implant for single-sided-deafness (SSD).  They were not convinced that there was significant benefit to warrant an expensive procedure.  My insurance company offered a final in-person “patient appeal” to a group of experts which I gladly accepted.  The administrative assistant supporting the committee told me afterwards that it was the best patient appeal he had ever seen, Powerpoint, handouts, citing of the research literature, and more. I said, “Well, I am an engineering professor and this is what I do!”  

Despite a good presentation, that final appeal was rejected a week later.  At this point, I accepted plan B, a bone conduction hearing device.  I had tested a temporary system on a headband and found it to provide some benefit. Insurance approved the surgery in less than 24 hours – perhaps because it cost 10% of a CI procedure!  

I used the bone conduction device for several years until 2020 when Covid pushed the world and work to Zoom.  In a Zoom world, the system does a pretty good job of highlighting the speaker, keeping background noise out when people mute themselves, etc.  For several years I never even pulled out the bone conduction processor.  

Finally in 2022 my university was returning in force to in–person classes and meetings.  I tried using the bone conduction processor and decided it wasn’t working well for me.  I knew the bone conduction system was routing all the sound to my good ear and therefore not able to give the benefits of stereo hearing.  On the other hand, perhaps the newly updated processors or subcutaneous (under the  skin) bone conduction systems might be an improvement.  

With that, I ventured forth to my clinic and they suggested a cochlear implant again since the FDA had recently approved it for SSD.  I asked what the odds of success were, as I wasn’t interested in trying to fight insurance again if it was just a remote 10% chance. He said, “I think better than 50-50 odds.”  That was good enough for me.  There was a lot of testing to make a clear case for insurance but a couple of months later insurance approved and a couple months after that I was getting wheeled into surgery for the cochlear implant!

Scheduling surgery can be tricky and not very flexible.  I had the surgery on the second day of Winter quarter. Fortunately as a department chair, I was able to rearrange my own course schedule so Fall and Spring were heavy with classes but Winter was light.  Three weeks later was activation.

I leaned heavily into rehab exercises. Two months after surgery I was listening to some audiobooks streamed to just the Bluetooth processor.  I was able to listen to books using only my formerly dead ear!  Family members noticed the benefit in conversations even more than I did.  (A lot less pointing my good ear to people to hear them and less “huh – can you repeat that?”)

Six months after activation, I found myself running an international conference in Monterrey Mexico.  I was supposed to just be the Director of Technical Activities, but the general Conference Chair had a family medical issue causing him to miss, and suddenly I was wearing both hats for a conference where very few people were native English speakers. The conference went very well, and I knew that I could never have done both jobs simultaneously without the help of the cochlear implant.  

Over 2 years later, the hearing on the cochlear implant continues getting better.  I recognize the cochlear implant will never be capable of the audio quality as a normal hearing ear, but perhaps normal age-related hearing loss on my good ear will someday make my Cochlear implant the better ear!  

What are some professional challenges you have faced related to your deafness?

Single-sided-deafness or SSD is not a very visible disability but entails many challenges, even if they are not nearly as challenging as for those who are deaf in both ears. In particular, without stereo hearing it is far harder to separate background noise from the person you are trying to listen to.  As an academic and administrator, I found meetings much more difficult in many ways: 

• A group of a dozen other people would have constant background noise and often the fan of an overhead projector running.  
• The effort to try to hear the speaker over the noise was very demanding, making every meeting a draining experience.  Sometimes it was necessary to schedule time to “recharge” after draining meetings.  
• Meeting rooms with only hard surfaces (to give a high tech appearance and cut costs!) became acoustic nightmares of echoes.  
• Conferences were a similar challenge – often exacerbated by the added challenge of international speakers I really wanted to hear from.
• My department has a large proportion of international students.  Between unfamiliar (to me) accents and the tendencies of some students to be softspoken for cultural or confidence reasons, understanding students has sometimes been difficult.

How have you mitigated these challenges?

Over the years, I have found a variety of coping or mitigation strategies.  

• Arriving early to meetings to pick the best acoustic seat
• Picking the meeting room or modality
• Insisting on carpeting in a remodel for sound absorption
• Investing in audio devices (microphones, speakers, headphones) as appropriate

I mentioned acoustic seating choice selection.  Even after getting a CI, I still find it helpful in situations to have my good ear to the center of gravity (sound).  

My default is still a lot of Zoom meetings, even when I’m on campus.  Partly it is more convenient to not have to hike across campus, but I also can often be assured of better acoustics on Zoom. I offer to meet with students quite liberally by Zoom, but require special notation for it to be in-person.  

While many parts of campus have had renovations or new buildings built with hardly any carpeting and lots of big glass windows, these rooms can be very difficult for anyone with hearing loss.  While I have raised this with higher administrators as a problem for our aging, non-traditional students, there was little that I could do for the broader campus. Early on as a Department Chair, I had the opportunity to do a long-needed remodelling project and I made sure that we had carpeting.  

What advice would you give your former self?

I wish that I could go back in time and tell myself about best practices for helping hard of hearing students. I still remember having a student early in my teaching career who was deaf. It was over 20 years ago and I had not yet started losing my hearing in my bad ear.  I don’t remember his situation exactly or what we did in terms of accommodation but looking back upon it, I’m sure I did not do as much as I could do now to help him.  Certainly technology has improved in what we can provide for accommodation, such as making video recordings of classes and more.  I hope that I did right by him at the time.