Birger Kollmeier
Birger Kollmeier
Curriculum Vitae
Birger Kollmeier is Head of the Division of Medical Physics in the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Oldenburg. He studied physics and medicine in Göttingen and completed his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1986 in the field of psychoacoustics under Prof. Dr. Manfred R. Schroeder. This was followed in 1989 by a Ph.D. degree in medicine under Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Eysholdt on the subject of binaural hearing aids.
After his "Habilitation" in physics, Kollmeier was appointed to a professorship at the University at Oldenburg in 1993, where he became Head of the Department of Medical Physics. Since 1996, he has also been Scientific Director of the Hörzentrum Oldenburg GmbH (since 2021 gGmbH) and was spokesman for the Center of Competence HörTech gGmbH from 2001 until the merger with the Hörzentrum in 2021. Since the founding of the Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology division of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in 2008, Kollmeier has been acting as its Head. Since 2012, he has been the spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all" (Oldenburg/Hanner), which in 2018 achieved a second funding period. He has also been a member of the German Society of Audiology since 1997 (2003-2005 President, 1997-2021 Board) and was active on the Executive Committee of the European Federation of Audiological Societies EFAS from 2012 to 2021 (2012-2017 Secretary General, 2018-2019 Deputy Chairman, 2020-2021 Chairman). From 2005 to 2014, Kollmeier was a member of the board of the German Society for Medical Physics and is currently a member of the council of the board of the German Society for Acoustics.
Kollmeier has supervised over 80 doctoral theses to date and is the author or co-author of over 450 scientific publications in the fields of hearing research, speech processing, auditory neuroscience and audiology. In addition to the German President's Award for Technology and Innovation (2012, Deutscher Zukunftspreis), he has received several scientific awards, including the Prize for Technical Communication Research (Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, 2001), the Karl Küpfmüller Ring of TU Darmstadt (2009), the Lower Saxony Science Prize (2011), the International Award of the American Academy of Audiology (2012), and the Glocker Medal (award of the German Society for Medical Physics, 2017). For his economic activities, he received the Hubert Forch Memorial Prize (2015) and the "Oldenburger Bulle" (2016).