Pitt Plastics Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr. Susanne Klauke is a Pitt Plastics Research Fellow with the Envision Research Institute. Her mentor is Dr. Ione Fine, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington. She completed the U.S. equivalency of a Doctorate of Philosophy in Biology at Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany.
Dr. Klauke evaluated the efficacy of a prototype of a visual prosthesis during a clinical trial. Perceptual tests in six blind human volunteers revealed that the retinal implant can elicit visual perception in blind retinitis pigmentosa patients. All of the participants reported visual percepts as a result of electrical stimulation of the retina. Moreover, subjects were able to discriminate between stimulation patterns of different orientations or at different locations on the retina.
Furthermore, Dr. Klauke has acquired considerable experience in using psychophysics techniques investigating perception of color. Her research, examining how the perceived hue of a colored stimulus is influenced by a colored surround, showed that perceived hues shift away from an inducing surround and that the amount of induced shifts depends on the difference in hue between stimulus and surround in color space.
Working for many years with a non-profit organization, which offers services to blind and visually impaired individuals in Germany, Dr. Klauke developed and supervised inclusive vocational training programs for blind and visually impaired individuals to become information specialists, online journalists, and audio engineers.
In her current research project, she aims to characterize how visually impaired individuals compensate for losing their face recognition ability, to investigate the impact of this loss on daily social interaction, and to develop tools which might facilitate this compensation.
Dr. Klauke's CV