Gallaudet’s Technology Access Program awarded $4.6 million grant

The Gallaudet University Technology Access Program has been awarded $4.625 million over a five-year project period for the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technology for People who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH-RERC).

This grant is funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research under the Administration for Community Living in the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Christian Vogler is project director, and Ms. Linda Kozma-Spytek is co-director.

The Gallaudet DHH-RERC is an applied research and development center that focuses on a specific intersection of technology and disability with internal collaborators from Gallaudet’s Department of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences and Department of Science, Technology and Mathematics, and external collaborators from the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Minnesota, the American Institutes for Research, as well as deaf and hard of hearing consumer organizations.

There are currently 18 RERCs nationwide; the Gallaudet DHH-RERC is the only one that is dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing issues. The other RERCs focus on other disability and technology areas.

This project is supported in part by grant number 90REGE0013, from the U.S. Administration for Community Living, Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. The dollar amount of federal funds awarded is $925,000 for the period of September 30, 2019 through September 30, 2020. The percentage of total cost of the project financed with federal funding is 91%. The percentage and dollar amount of the total costs funded by non-governmental sources is 9% at $90,973.

Congratulations to Dr. Vogler and Ms. Kozma-Spytek!