Nicholas S. Reed, PhD

I am faculty in the Departments of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery and Population Health and in the NYU Langone Health Optimal Aging Institute. My training is in clinical audiology (AuD, Towson University) and public health with a focus in epidemiology (PhD, Johns Hopkins University) which uniquely position me to approach my research on hearing loss and aging from both a clinical and population level. More narrowly, my research focuses on direct-to-consumer hearing care, understanding hearing aid use in the United States, the relationship between hearing loss and health care outcomes/interactions (e.g., satisfaction with care, inpatient safety, quality of care, delirium, etc.), and whether interventions targeting hearing loss can mitigate these associations.

I currently lead a first-in-kind Audiology Core, founded in 2018, that aims to support and lead the integration of hearing measures into epidemiologic studies of aging (e.g., protocol development, quality assurance, quality control) and has directly supported hearing data collection in over 25000 participants across numerous large cohort studies including the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, National Health Aging and Trends Study, and the Longitudinal Aging Study of India-Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia.

I believe our research should make a difference in the lives of people and have strived to be a conscious communicator of my work to the public and policy professionals. The impact of my work has resulted in feature interviews across media outlets including the New York Times and CBS Sunday Morning and contributed to policy changes at the Federal and local level. My findings that some amplifiers could perform as well as traditional hearing aids directly contributed to the 2017 Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act that added an OTC category of hearing aids from the Food and Drug Administration while my work suggesting hearing loss is associated with 46% higher risk of a hospital readmission and $22000 more in healthcare spending relative to those without hearing loss over a 10-year period had led to hospital-level changes in accommodations to create a more equitable health care system for the millions of adults with hearing loss. To further this goal, I was accepted into the 2023-2024 Health Aging and Policy Fellowship where I worked in the Federal government to better bridge gaps between academia and policy.