Her doctoral work looked at optimizing the delivery of fricatives in hearing aids for profoundly deaf adults and her post-doctoral research was in psychophysics, speech perception and dead regions, based in the Hearing Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. The majority of her research over the past decade at UCL has looked at optimizing outcomes for cochlear implant users, more recently focusing on electrode selection, plasticity, training and bilateral implants. Debi is a sub-theme (‘Transforming Hearing Devices’) lead for the UCL Biomedical Research Centre in Deafness.