RIT center receives $6.3 million grant

From: Rochester Business Journal, NY - Sep 23, 2003

By KATHY QUINN THOMAS
Rochester Business Journal

A center at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf has received a five-year, $6.3 million grant from the National Institute on Aging.
The grant will allow the International Center for Hearing and Speech Research—a collaborative program of NTID and the University of Rochester’s Division of Otolaryngology—to study presbycusis, age-related hearing loss.
“Presbycusis is currently the number-one communicative disorder in our aging population,” said Robert Frisina, director of ICHSR. “It’s characterized by loss of hearing for many everyday sounds and difficulty understanding speech, especially when background noise is present.”
An estimated 28 million people nationwide suffer from presbycusis.
Frisina is principal investigator of the new project, working with a multidisciplinary team from the University of Rochester, including William O’Neill, James Ison and Joseph Walton.
“The long-term goal of this project is to develop biomedical interventions that prevent or cure sensorimotor disorders in our aging population,” Frisina said.

(c) 2003 Rochester Business Journal.