Our results suggest that mature cochlear supporting cells can be reprogrammed into sensory hair cells, providing a possible target for hair cell regeneration in mammals.

The Emerging Research Grants program is a competitive process that awards grants to only the most promising investigators. Recipients are exceptionally well-positioned to secure subsequent funding from major federal funders. In fact, ERG awardees (2002–present) have gone on to be awarded an average of $59 in federal research funding for every dollar of their ERG grant.

Hearing Health Foundation’s mission to fund innovative, groundbreaking hearing and balance science is only possible because of you. We are grateful for the support of our community.

Congratulations to the 14 scientists awarded Emerging Research Grants for 2025.

These findings mean lower-frequency sounds may help older adults better understand complex sound environments. This may be useful for designing better hearing aids or other devices to help older people hear more clearly.

Our results are consistent with the theory that people rely on auditory information to coordinate the motor control of their vocal tract in service to speech production and opens up many new, critically important questions about people with congenital auditory deficits. 

These findings show that even with appropriate amplification via hearing aids, children with hearing loss still have trouble processing certain aspects of sound, particularly the basic pitch of voices. These objectively measurable brain responses may explain why children with hearing loss struggle more in noisy or echoey environments.

Our research aims to better understand the underlying biological mechanisms of such variability and pave the way for a more personalized and effective hearing aid technology, offering hope for those struggling in noisy listening environments.

The results of our research suggest that individual differences in the ability to use auditory cues in noise may contribute to the range of communication challenges experienced by older adults.

Interestingly, some of the genes that were more active in the variant hair cells are typically more active in the supporting cells than in the hair cells. It could be that when miR-96 is a variant, some genes more specific to supporting cells, and which are typically kept turned off in hair cells, incorrectly become activated in hair cells. 

We found consistent evidence that auditory nerve function worsens with age, but the impact of noise exposure was less clear and seemed to depend on the specifics of each study.

While individual neurons in the auditory midbrain may not accurately convey information about sound features, the collective activity of these neurons accurately represents sounds.