HHF News

HHF HHF Launches NEWS Hearing Health Hour Webinar Series On Oct. 26, 2020, Hearing Health Foundation (HHF) is hosting its first Hearing Health Hour event via Zoom video conferencing. Presented quarterly, Hearing Health Hour is a lay-friendly webinar series about managing hearing loss and related conditions and research updates presented by Emerging Research Grants (ERG) recipients. The inaugural session is titled “Age-Related Hearing Loss: Problems and Solutions” and is presented by 2014 ERG scientist Samira Anderson, Au.D., Ph.D. Untreated age-related hearing loss leads to many changes throughout the brain and can affect speech understanding and cognitive ability. Anderson’s presentation reviews how hearing loss changes the way our brains respond to speech and how it may affect cognitive functions, such as working memory. The extent to which hearing aid amplification can reverse these changes is discussed, along with a Q&A at the end of the session.

Anderson’s 2014 ERG project was generously funded by the Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International. She is an associate professor in the department of hearing and speech sciences at the University of Maryland. To register or to view the full, captioned presentation, see hhf.org/ webinar. To receive updates about future webinars, sign up at hhf.org/subscribe.

ERG Alumni Earn Prestigious National Institutes of Health Funding

From left: Anat Lubetzky, Ph.D., and Merri Rosen, Ph.D., have both recently been awarded NIDCD grants.

Two ERG alumni were recently awarded grants by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to build on their HHF-funded work. For her R21 grant, 2019 ERG scientist Anat Lubetzky, Ph.D., of New York University, aims to clarify the link between hearing loss and falls and to develop improved balance assessments. Hearing and balance disorders triple the risk of falls, but little is known about the importance of sounds for balance.

Northeast Ohio Medical University’s Merri Rosen, Ph.D., has been awarded a five-year, $2.3 million NIDCD grant to study the effects of early life stress on auditory perception. Rosen’s 2013 ERG grant was generously funded by the Grand Chapter Royal Arch Masons International, and was immediately followed by a five-year, $1.8 million NIH grant. This new grant extends and funds Rosen’s project for an additional five years.

We’re proud of their ongoing work. HHF’s ERG program has long served as a career springboard and an incubator for innovative research that can successfully compete for major federal research funding.

We’ve Moved!

After a pandemic delay and finishing touches to the interior, HHF moved into new offices in July. Please note our new address is:

575 Eighth Ave, #1201, New York, New York 10018

For now staff members are on a rotating schedule and, when present, wearing face masks and staying socially distant. We’ll continue to monitor public health directives and are happy to be in this bright, clean, well-ventilated space on a quieter block (better for our ears!).