Hearing for All: Overcoming Borders in Acoustic Communication

Hearing impairment is the most frequent chronic neurosensory disease (progressively affecting 17% of our population); it often leads to social isolation. Improving hearing aids, auditory implants and other treatments is the goal of our Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all (Oldenburg/ Hannover). An overview will be given with a focus on recognizing speech in noise – the classical “Cocktail Party Problem”. Listen yourself to experience the communication borders if hearing fails and to learn about new ways to overcome them!

Birger Kollmeier

Director of the Department for Medical Physics and Acoustics at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universität Oldenburg.

He studied physics and medicine at the Universität Göttingen, Germany. He received the Ph.D. degree in physics (supervisor: Prof. Dr. M.R. Schroeder) and the Ph.D. degree in medicine (supervisor Prof. Dr. Dr. Ulrich Eysholdt) in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Since 1993, he has been Full Professor of physics at the Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany and head of the Abteilung Medizinische Physik.

In addition to his professorship, Birger Kollmeier is the scientific director of the Hörzentrum Oldenburg GmbH (since 1996), the center of competence HörTech gGmbH (since 2000) and the Fraunhofer IDMT division for hearing, speech and audio technology (since 2008). Since 2012 he is coordinator of the Cluster of Excellence “Hearing4all”. Additionally, he is past-president and board member of the German Audiological Society (since 1997), Secretary-General of the European Federation of Audiological Societies (since 2011), and advisory board member of the German Acoustical Society. For 10 years, he was also board member of the German Society for Medical Physics.

He supervised more than 55 Ph.D. theses and authored and coauthored more than 350 scientific papers in various areas of hearing research, speech processing, auditory neuroscience, and audiology. Prof. Kollmeier was awarded with several scientific prizes, including the Alcatel-SEL research prize for technical communication (2001), the Karl-Küpfmüller Ring of the TU Darmstadt (2009), the Science Award (Wissenschaftspreis) of the state of Lower Saxony (2011), the International Award of the American Academy of Audiology (2012), the German Presidents prize for Science and Innovation (2012) and the Glocker medal of the German Society for Medical Physics (2017). For his achievements in business development, he was also awarded with the Hubert Forch memorial prize (2015) and the “Oldenburger Bulle” (2016).