The “Centre for Hearing Research” was officially opened on 23 January 2008 at The Haus des Hörens in Oldenburg with a ceremonial event. In future, the University of Oldenburg, Hannover Medical School and other Lower Saxony-based institutions specialising in audiology and applied hearing research will collaborate here. The state is providing targeted funding for hearing research based in Lower Saxony in order to strengthen it for the new round of the Federal and State Excellence Initiative to promote science and research. “When Oldenburg’s hearing research came away empty-handed in last year’s first round of decisions on clusters of excellence, there was initially great disappointment,” recalls Professor Birger Kollmeier, Professor of Physics at the University of Oldenburg. “But it took less than a year for the efforts to establish a hearing research cluster to bear fruit after all.” The state of Lower Saxony is providing 3.75 million euros in funding for the research initiative ‘Hearing and its Disorders’, in which the University of Oldenburg, Hannover Medical School and other universities in Lower Saxony are collaborating. The centre is led by Oldenburg professors Georg Klump (Biology), Birger Kollmeier (Medical Physics) and the Director of the MHH Clinic for ENT, Professor Thomas Lenarz. For years, the University of Oldenburg and Hannover Medical School have been among the world’s leading research institutions in the field of audiology and applied hearing research. A whole range of successful structures have been established, including the two hearing centres in Oldenburg and Hanover, the Oldenburg HörTech Centre of Excellence and the joint Lower Saxony Audiology Initiative. Around 80 per cent of all hearing aids sold worldwide incorporate the results of research carried out in Oldenburg. The Hannover Medical School performs the highest number of cochlear implant and implantable hearing aid procedures worldwide.
“The topic of ‘hearing’ is becoming a unique selling point for Lower Saxony,” emphasised Minister for Science Lutz Stratmann in his speech. “With the Centre for Hearing Research, the University of Oldenburg, together with the Hannover Medical School, is consistently pursuing a strategy of establishing a state-specific profile, a strategy that has already found its origins in the Lower Saxony Audiology Initiative.” More