Mary Florentine is a Matthews Distinguished Professor, specialising in psychoacoustics with interests in models of hearing, non-native speech comprehension in background noise, cross-cultural attitudes towards noise, and hearing loss prevention.
Education
Florentine completed her undergraduate degree in experimental psychology at Northeastern University in 1973. After some time spent studying pre-doctoral electronic engineering at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and at the Audiology and ENT Department at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, she completed her Doctor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in 1978.
Career
She is a Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University. She continued her graduate study at Northeastern University, earning a master"s degree in experimental psychology and auditory perception in 1975. She then went on to work as a post-doctoral research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Since then, she has also worked as a visiting scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseille, France.
The Osaka University in Toyonaka, Japan. And, on several occasions, at the acoustics laboratory at the Danish Technical University.
At Northeastern University, Florentine is an effective and popular teacher, securing the Excellence-in-Teaching Award only a few years after starting her faculty position. Her academic work has also appealed to more general audiences and she has been interviewed for TIME, Redbook and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Florentine co-edited and (co-)wrote a few chapters in the recently published textbook Loudness (Springer Handbook of Auditory Research), which explains some conceptual thinking relating to loudness, issues of loudness study and measurement, hearing and hearing loss models, and physiological effects of loud sounds.
Personal Florentine was born in Nutley, New Jersey, and was the eldest in a family with five children. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to take up her undergraduate study, which was fully supported by a merit grant, and has lived there ever since, except for brief periods of study and work abroad. They have one daughter, born in 1987.
Softness Imperception Binaural Loudness Summation.