Career Florentine completed her undergraduate degree in
experimental psychology at Northeastern University in 1973. She continued her graduate study at Northeastern University, earning a master's degree in experimental psychology and
auditory perception in 1975. After some time spent studying pre-doctoral
electronic engineering at the
Technical University of Munich in
Germany and at the
Audiology and
ENT Department at
Copenhagen University Hospital in
Denmark, she completed her PhD at Northeastern University in 1978. She then went on to work as a post-doctoral research fellow at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Since then, she has also worked as a visiting scientist at the
National Centre for Scientific Research in
Marseille,
France; the
Osaka University in
Toyonaka,
Japan; and, on several occasions, at the acoustics laboratory at the
Danish Technical University. In 1980 she returned to Northeastern University as the director of the Communication Research Laboratory and in 1986 commenced a long-term collaboration with her husband,
Søren Buus, at the Hearing Research Laboratory until he died in 2004. At Northeastern University, Florentine is an effective and popular teacher, securing the Excellence-in-Teaching Award only a few years after starting her faculty position. Her academic work has also appealed to more general audiences and she has been interviewed for
TIME,
Redbook and
National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered. Florentine co-edited and (co-)wrote a few chapters in the recently published textbook
Loudness (Springer Handbook of Auditory Research), which explains some conceptual thinking relating to loudness, issues of loudness study and measurement, hearing and hearing loss models, and physiological effects of loud sounds.
Personal Florentine was born in
Nutley,
New Jersey, and was the eldest in a family with five children. She moved to
Boston, Massachusetts, to take up her undergraduate study, which was fully supported by a merit grant, and has lived there ever since, except for brief periods of study and work abroad. While abroad, she met her husband Søren Buus, who also became her primary collaborator, and they married in 1980. They have one daughter, born in 1987. ==Notable work==