Soundtrace Adds Former Shoebox Leaders to Move Hearing Conservation Beyond the Test

Dr. Christi Haynes and Alexa Gough bring clinical and commercial expertise to Soundtrace's unified platform for hearing testing, noise monitoring, and hearing protection fit testing

CINCINNATI, Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Soundtrace, Inc., a physician-led hearing conservation platform for industrial employers, today announced two senior hires. Dr. Christi Haynes, formerly Lead Occupational Audiologist at Shoebox, joins as Director of Audiology. Alexa Gough, formerly Director of North American Sales and Occupational Health at Shoebox, joins as Enterprise Sales Director. Both additions support Soundtrace's next phase of growth as the company expands beyond audiometric testing into a full hearing conservation program built on unified data and clinical action.

"This industry has spent decades optimizing for checking the compliance box," said Jeff Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Soundtrace. "Mobile vans focused on completing the testing and moving on to the next company, leaving the clinical follow-up and critical work of actually managing hearing conservation to employers to figure out. Tablet-testing companies digitized the test, but largely followed the same model. Neither addresses the bigger problem: preventing hearing loss in the workplace.

"At Soundtrace, compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. We started Soundtrace nearly six years ago with a clear mission: eliminate preventable hearing loss. From day one, we believed a hearing conservation program should do more than administer a test and document the result. It should actively help prevent hearing loss. That's why we built an AI-powered, data-driven platform that connects hearing testing, noise exposure, and hearing protection, using predictive intelligence to identify hearing decline earlier and give employers the information they need to intervene before additional hearing loss occurs."

Soundtrace pairs audiometric testing with noise exposure data from its own cloud-connected noise dosimeters and hearing protection device (HPD) fit testing, recently named a best practice in OSHA's Safety and Health Information Bulletin Hearing Protector Fit Testing: Ensuring Appropriate Noise Protection at Work, all running natively on one platform instead of three separate vendors. That gives employers and Soundtrace's medical team a single digital hearing conservation program instead of a standalone test: the ability to identify emerging hearing-risk patterns, investigate whether they correspond with particular jobs, shifts, noise exposures, or protection failures, and intervene before additional hearing loss occurs.

Haynes joins Soundtrace's clinical team, working alongside Chief Medical Officer Dr. Subinoy Das, the company's national Professional Supervisor of Record, to expand the program that reviews audiometric data, noise exposure trends, and fit testing results across Soundtrace's customer base.

"Most hearing conservation programs generate data and then file it away," Haynes said. "What drew me to Soundtrace is that the data from across the program gets used, not just the audiometric results. A medical team looks at it, an employer acts on it, and together you can identify where hearing risk may be emerging and intervene before additional hearing loss occurs."

Gough will lead enterprise sales strategy for Soundtrace, working with the company's account executive team to bring the expanded platform to large industrial employers.

"I spent my career helping employers buy audiometric testing equipment, and I watched their EHS teams receive test results without a clear path for follow-up," Gough said. "Soundtrace built the piece that was missing: a way to turn testing, noise, and hearing protection data into a program built to help prevent noise-induced hearing loss. That's a different conversation than the one I used to have."

The hires come as Soundtrace scales its footprint across manufacturing, food production, logistics, and government agencies, and now supports hearing conservation programs in 46 states. They also follow an independent third-party review completed earlier this year, led by Scott Ketcham, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, confirming that Soundtrace's program aligns with applicable OSHA hearing conservation requirements and, in several areas, exceeds the intent of the regulation when implemented in accordance with Soundtrace's stated protocols. Together, they reflect the company's plan to keep investing in the clinical and commercial teams supporting that growth.

About Soundtrace

Soundtrace is a physician-led, hardware-embedded software platform that automates OSHA 29 CFR 1910.95 hearing conservation compliance for industrial employers. By unifying audiometric testing, noise exposure, and hearing protection fit testing data on a single AI-native platform, Soundtrace gives employers and its medical team the tools to identify hearing-risk patterns and act on them, rather than simply archiving test results. Soundtrace is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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SOURCE Soundtrace Inc.