The Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine recently featured an article on SLHS Professor Christine Yoshinaga-Itano, highlighting her groundbreaking research on newborn hearing screening. Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano's research became a catalyst in establishing screening programs and guidelines for early detection and intervention across the nation. 

In 1997, Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano's research, which expanded upon the pioneering work by Dr. Marion Downs, convinced the Colorado Legislature to pass one of the Nation’s first laws mandating universal-newborn-hearing screening. Christie was the first to demonstrate that early intervention with infants who had hearing loss as a single disability, resulted in an 80% success rate for maintaining age-appropriate language development and intelligible speech in the first five years of life. Standard newborn hearing screening programs suggested by her work are now in all 50 states. In addition to Dr. Yoshinaga's work in the U.S., she has provided support to many countries advancing their own early hearing detection and intervention programs, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Korea, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Philippines, and South Africa. Recently, she also traveled to China to help audiologists with the infrastructure to improve their services and outcomes.

In 2004, Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano was honored by the Lake Drive Foundation for Children Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Mountain Lakes, N.J. , for her ground breaking research which revolutionized early diagnosis and intervention strategies for infants. For further details and more information on newborn hearing tests, see the original Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine article by Clint Talbott. Congratulations Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano!