The Oldenburg hearing researcher Prof. Dr. Dr. Birger Kollmeier was awarded the Karl Küpfmüller Ring of the Technical University of Darmstadt on 13 November 2009. The Karl Küpfmüller Ring was established in 1977 to mark the 80th birthday of the founder of the systems theory of electrical communication. The ten previous winners include Nobel Prize winners Prof Dr Manfred Eigen (1994) and Prof Dr Erwin Neher (2004). According to the statutes, the Karl Küpfmüller Ring is to be awarded "as an extraordinary honour to scientists who, through their research activities, have also promoted scientific knowledge outside their specialist field and have significantly influenced scientific or technical development".
Kollmeier is Head of the Department of Medical Physics at the University of Oldenburg. He is also the founder and director of the "Hörzentrum Oldenburg", spokesperson for the "Centre for Hearing Research" and spokesperson for the "HörTech Center of Competence". With this award, the TU honours Kollmeier's "special achievements in the interdisciplinary field of developing new processes for hearing aid technology and their innovative medical and physical realisation".
Kollmeier, born in Minden in 1958, studied physics and medicine in Göttingen. In his work, he deals with hearing problems from both a medical and a physical point of view. He also applies the results of Küpfmüller's systems theory when investigating new processes for hearing aids and their realisation. Kollmeier's areas of work include neurosensory technology, speech perception, problems of hearing and auditory sound, automatic speech recognition and signal processing for hearing aids. The hearing researcher has been honoured with numerous awards, has been appointed to universities abroad and has an extraordinarily extensive list of publications to his name. He works closely with other universities, clinics and industry and supervises numerous national and international research projects.