Course Directors

John Krouse, PhD, MBA, MD, FAAOA – Course Co-Director

Dr. John Krouse is a retired professor, former chair of otolaryngology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, and former dean of the School of Medicine and executive vice president for Health Affairs at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Dr. Krouse graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University, and received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Rochester. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Krouse also received an MBA from the Fox School of Business at Temple University.

Dr. Krouse completed his internship in surgery at Beth Israel Hospital and his residency training in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary/Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is board certified in otolaryngology.

Jennifer Villwock, MD, FAAOA – Course Co-Director

Dr. Villwock is a Professor of Otolaryngology, a fellowship trained rhinologist & anterior skull base surgeon, the Section Chief of Otolaryngology at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the Vice Chair for Research for the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Kansas. She is passionate about accessible innovation to improve patient care. Examples of this include her research, which has led to the creation and patenting of AROMA (Affordable, Rapid, Olfactory Measurement Array). This is a novel objective olfactory test that is significantly more cost effective and designed for real-time integration into a clinical workflow. Using AROMA as a noninvasive biomarkers of dementia and cognitive decline is the focus of her recently awarded $3.8M grant from the NIH. She has also been awarded a $2.5M grant from the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program to study multisensory dysfunction as a predictor of traumatic brain injury severity and recovery trajectory over time. Dr. Villwock’s work in olfaction has previously been funded by the AAOA to understand allergy’s impact on olfaction and the potential to use olfactory changes to guide allergy treatment. Dr. Villwock has also created the Activities Based Checks (ABCs) of Pain, an infographic-style functional pain scale to improve communication about pain between patients and their care teams while decreasing the cognitive load associated with the completion and interpretation of existing pain surveys. She was selected as a finalist in the NIH National Institute on Aging’s inaugural Health Aging Challenge and Entrepreneurial Bootcamp for her work with AROMA. Dr. Villwock subsequently won the Audience Choice Award at the 2023 Alzheimer’s Association pitch competition and was a finalist at the AARP AgeTech Collaborative at ViVE2023 Making Aging Easier pitch competition.

Course Faculty