Maria Södersten

Affiliated researcher at the Division of Speech and Language Pathology, Clintec, KI. My main field of interest within speech and language pathology is assessment and intervention of patients with different types of voice disorders and development of outcome measures for interventions such as voice therapy and phonosurgery. My focus the last decade has been clinical work and research regarding voice and communication for transgender and genderdiverse people. I received my PhD in 1994 at Karolinska Institutet with the thesis "Vocal fold closure during phonation - physiological, perceptual, and acoustic studies". I was a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University in New York 1983-1984, became associate professor at KI 2006 and adjunct professor at KI between 2019-2024.

The research area "Voice, speech and communication in persons with gender incongruence" includes several projects. One is a prospective treatment study of transwomen, people who are assigned male at birth and who identify themselves as women. Many need gender affirming voice training to find a voice congruent with their gender identity. Some also need pitch-raising vocal fold surgery. An extensive treatment study has been carried out in collaboration with researchers at LaTrobe University in Australia including 76 participants. The purpose was to investigate effects and efficiency of gender affirming voice training with self reported outcomes as primary and acoustic and listening outcomes as seconday. At present we investigate predictors for good training results. Other projects are to develop questionnaires for both people assigned female and people assigned male at birth. Studies about testosterone’s impact on the vocal folds and voice have been carried out. 
In the area ​​"Work-related voice disorders and voice ergonomics", voice use has been studied with a portable voice accumulator, which can measure the speaker's voice activity, and the level of the noise in the environment up to a week's time. Voice data is stored in a database from which the covariation between voice usage, noise level and self-perceived voice problems can be mapped. Results have been presented in a doctoral thesis. Other project interests are how to meaure subglottal pressure in a clinically ecollogically valid way.