Dr. Sharon Curhan, MD, ScM is a physician and epidemiologist in the CDNM Chronic Disease Epidemiology Group and Director of CHEARS, the Conservation of Hearing Study. As a clinical researcher in chronic disease epidemiology and prevention, her research focuses on the identification of risk factors for acquired hearing loss and tinnitus in several large ongoing cohort studies involving over 250,000 participants, the Nurses’ Health Studies, the Growing Up Today Study, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, with an emphasis on potentially modifiable risk factors that may aid in efforts towards prevention.

Dr. Curhan is the founding Editor of the Epidemiology of Auditory and Vestibular Disorders section for the journal Ear and Hearing, and is an Associate Editor of JARO. As a member of the WHO expert group, she helped to develop the WHO Ear and Hearing Survey Handbook. She is a member of the CDC/NIOSH National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) Hearing Loss Prevention Cross Sector Council and the NIOSH Noise Hazard Recognition Workgroup. Her research also encompasses other areas of neurocognitive and neurodegenerative disease, and the epidemiology of herpes zoster (“shingles”), shingles vaccination, and associations with adverse health outcomes. She has mentored students, fellows and junior faculty. She also co-leads the CDNM Healthy Aging and Longevity Working Group, bringing together a multi-disciplinary collaboration of investigators, clinicians and data scientists and consolidating the expansive high-dimensional resources to advance the understanding of aging and healthy longevity. She has published extensively on the epidemiology of hearing loss, tinnitus and other chronic diseases.