Current Award Recipients
2024 Mini-Grant Awards
| Bloedel Affiliate Applicant: Christina Zhao, PhD Research Associate Professor Speech & Hearing Sciences University of Washington |
$10,000 Award Proposal Title: Examining individual variability in infant-directed music |
McKay Endowed Faculty Fellow
David W. Raible, PhD
Virginia Merrill Bloedel Chair
Professor – Otolaryngology-HNS and Biological Structure
The McKay Endowed Faculty Fellowship is made possible with a generous gift from Robert and Anne McKay and the University of Washington Matching Gift Program. This Faculty Fellowship was proposed to enhance the University’s ability to recruit/retain faculty and provide opportunities for professional development for faculty in the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center. The intention of the McKay Faculty Fellowship is to support cellular-level research on the causes, prevention or remediation of hearing or vestibular loss. Robert McKay was particularly interested in cellular imaging. When he found out that NIDCD P30 support for the Bloedel digital microscopy facility was ending, he knew this was what he wanted to support.
2022-2025 Bloedel Scholar
Ione Fine, PhD
Professor – Psychology
Dr. Fine studied Experimental Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford and did her PhD with Robert Jacobs at Rochester, NY. She then went to the University of California, San Diego to do a postdoc with Donald MacLeod and Karen Dobkins. After a brief spell at Second Sight Medical Products Inc., she joined the faculty at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on exploring how the human brain adapts to being blind and developing new technologies for sight recovery (‘bionic eyes’).
From her Year One report, presented in August 2023:
The Bloedel Scholarship has allowed me to significantly reduce my teaching. Bloedel funding supported my salary in Spring 2023, and will cover 1.4 months of summer salary. This reduced teaching time allowed me to focus more of my time on research.
- Funding towards new grants or professional awards:
- K99 awarded to Woon Ju Park (I am mentor).
- RO1 awarded to Justin Golub (I am collaborator). Early Age-Related Hearing Loss Investigation (EARHLI): A Randomized Controlled Trial to Assess the Mechanisms Linking Early Age-Related Hearing Loss and Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias.
- Mentoring graduate student dissertations and/or admission to further programs:
- One of the major achievements of this year is that Woon Ju Park, a highly talented postdoctoral researcher focused on sensory plasticity, with an emphasis on auditory processing in blind individuals, received a job offer at Georgia Tech.
- Further proposals that have resulted, or are expected:
- Application for a T32 award in May 2024. The work for this will begin in September.
- Application for a multisite RO1 in 2024.