The University of Oldenburg has cleared the first hurdle in the Excellence Strategy, the successor programme to the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments: The cluster of excellence proposal "Hearing4all: Research for personalised treatment of hearing deficits / Hören für alle: Forschung zur individuellen Behandlung von Hörstörungen" has been positively evaluated.
Based on the results of the previous cluster of excellence, the Oldenburg researchers developed the proposal together with hearing researchers from Hanover. The full application must now be submitted to the German Research Foundation by February 2018, with an international commission making the final decision in September 2018. A total of 88 out of 195 preliminary proposals submitted in the "Cluster of Excellence" funding line reached the second phase of the application process.
"The positive vote is a great success for our university. The German Research Foundation and the German Council of Science and Humanities have recognised the outstanding work of our Oldenburg hearing researchers. Now it will be a matter of us - together with our strong partners - using our scientific expertise to achieve our ambitious goal and working intensively on the full proposal," says University President Prof. Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper.
"In the current Cluster of Excellence, we have developed important building blocks for better diagnostics, hearing systems and assistive technologies," says the Cluster's spokesperson, Oldenburg physicist and physician Prof Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier. "Building on this, we want to develop solutions for all forms of hearing loss that are specifically tailored to the needs of those affected. In this way, we will move from an empirical, subjective approach to modern, data-driven science and precision medicine with a high standard". The clinical spokesperson for the planned cluster is Prof Dr Thomas Lenarz, Director of the Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic at Hannover Medical School.
In future, the hearing researchers want to bundle their work into four research strands, which on the one hand reflect the development chain from basic research to hearing technology and on the other the severity of hearing loss: The first strand aims to use modern neuroscientific methods to gain an even better understanding of the complex interplay between hearing, perception and processing in the brain over a person's lifetime. The second strand involves IT-based research with the aim of establishing a virtual multilingual hearing clinic. In the third strand, the researchers want to develop individually targeted diagnostic and treatment procedures for patients with moderate to severe impairments and complete deafness. Based on the scientific and technical findings, a fundamentally new system technology for the hearing aids of the future is to be developed in the fourth strand.
The currently planned project involves 25 neuroscientists, doctors, psychologists, linguists, physicists and engineers from the Universities of Oldenburg and Hanover and Hanover Medical School. The Jade University of Applied Sciences, HörTech gGmbH, the hearing centres in Oldenburg and Hanover, the Fraunhofer Project Group for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology and Fraunhofer ITEM are also project partners. "Hearing4all" is one of the world's leading centres in medical technology, hearing research, audiology, medical diagnostics and therapy. Around 80 per cent of all hearing aids worldwide contain know-how from Oldenburg.
The current cluster of excellence was one of the winners of the Excellence Initiative in 2012 and has since been funded with almost 30 million euros. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and the Volkswagen Foundation are also supporting the cluster with one million euros.
About the Excellence Strategy:
With the Excellence Strategy, the federal and state governments aim to continue and further develop their projects to strengthen universities, which began in particular with the Excellence Initiative (running from 2005 to 2017). Specifically, the aim is to promote scientific excellence, profile building and co-operation in the science system in order to strengthen Germany as a centre of science. There are two funding lines: clusters of excellence and universities of excellence. Funding for clusters of excellence begins on 1 January 2019 and runs for seven years.
