Welcome to the web site of the Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (C-CEBH). C-CEBH is a multi-department and multi-college program that includes 17 core faculty and more than 115 undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and research associates.

C-CEBH is founded on the principle that insights gained from studying different species, both vertebrate and invertebrate, can often help in understanding human hearing, in finding new cures for deafness and hearing disorders, in designing robotic devices, and in assessing the effects of noise on communication. As examples of the work done in C-CEBH, faculty in the Hearing and Speech department are studying how hearing loss in older individuals affects speech understanding, how cochlear implants can be improved, and how hearing guides speech and language development in young children.

Faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering are studying how complex sounds such as speech are represented in the auditory cortex. Faculty in Biology and in Psychology are studying how non-human organisms localize sound, learn vocalizations, navigate through their environment using acoustic cues, and how noisy environments affect the health and well-being of both animals and humans. 

C-CEBH is directly funded by an institutional training grant (T-32) from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) , and from funds provided by the University of Maryland. In addition, faculty in C-CEBH also receive research funding from NIH, NSF, and many other federal agencies. We hold conferences yearly, a Translational Research Day and a joint workshop with NIDCD.

In addition to UMD faculty from five departments, C-CEBH includes intramural faculty from the NIDCD (one of the National Institutes of Health, NIH) many of whom are adjunct UMD faculty and collaborate with C-CEBH investigators in research and student training. There are also other researchers in the area (e.g., Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) and international research and teaching collaborations (Germany, Denmark, China, and several other countries).

These close collaborations provide special opportunities for bringing additional expertise, skills and facilities to collaborative research questions especially in the areas of molecular genetics, developmental biology, and brain imaging. Together, the breadth of research questions addressed by faculty and students at C-CEBH and their collaborators is unparalleled.