Centre for Hearing Research
Application for a cluster of excellence “Hearing4all”:
“Models, technology and solutions for diagnostics, restoration and support of hearing”
The Centre for Hearing Research was opened in 2008 to support and coordinate the joint research between the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, the Medical University of Hannover, the Leibniz University Hannover and other lower Saxonian institutions that focus on Audiology and applied hearing research. The research centre is headed by the interdisciplinary team of Prof. Birger Kollmeier (Medical Physics, Universität Oldenburg), Prof. Georg Klump (Biology, Universität Oldenburg) and Prof. Thomas Lenarz (ORL clinic, Medical University Hannover)
Our mission is to establish an internationally outstanding joint research Centre for Hearing Research that builds upon the complementary expertise in the fundamental, applied and clinical research on hearing devices and implants at the internationally highly recognized and well connected cluster sites in Oldenburg and Hannover. The state of lower Saxony supports the research initiative “Hearing and its disorders” of the Universities in Hannover and Oldenburg with 3,75 mio. €. One major aim of this organization is to successfully compete within the German National Excellence Initiative.
The first goal has been achieved on March 2nd, 2011: The cluster application “Hearing4all” has entered the final round of the excellence initiative as the only new cluster application from Lower Saxony!
Exzellenzcluster “Hearing4all”
The cluster “Hearing4all” was selected out of 107 excellence cluster applications by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the German Council of Science and Humanities. Alltogether 27 clusters (including “Hearing4all”) from a large variety of disciplines have now been invited to submit full proposals until August 31st, 2011. Our cluster involves a team of 24 top-level interdisciplinary researchers from various fields ranging from Physics and Engineering to Medicine, Biology and Psychology. Besides the three universities already represented in the Centre for Hearing Research, the Jade Hochschule and the non-university research institutions Kompetenzzentrum HörTech, the Fraunhofer project group for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology, the Hörzentrum Oldenburg and the Hörzentrum Hannover contribute to the cluster as well as twelve industrial partners of the “auditory valley”.
The vision of the interdisciplinary cluster of excellence “Hearing4all” is to achieve better hearing for people with various degrees of hearing impairment and different individual needs. The cluster thus addresses the high demand for functional individualized hearing devices supporting speech communication in everyday life in our ageing communication society. The members of the cluster strive to achieve this goal by developing new diagnostic tools and an aetiology-based individualized therapeutic approach that will allow the engineering of better hearing devices and ubiquitous assistive technologies as well as the construction of new auditory implants.