Annual Report 2025

Research and Evidence

ACHIEVE Study Secondary Analyses

Main findings of the ACHIEVE (Aging and Cognitive Health Evaluation in Elders) study, co-led by Frank Lin and published in the Lancet in 2023, found that treating hearing loss in older adults at increased risk for cognitive decline slows down loss of thinking and memory abilities. 

In 2024, findings from planned secondary analyses examining brain health, mental health and well-being, physical function, and health care use began to be published, giving us a fuller picture of the relationship between hearing intervention and healthy aging.  Like the study’s main findings, results of these secondary analyses have implications for clinical practice and for federal policy around improving Medicare's hearing care coverage.

The HEARS Study

All older adults deserve access to the tools they need for healthy aging, yet massive economic and racial disparities limit access. Led by core faculty Carrie Nieman, MD, MPH, HEARS tested a way to bridge the gap in who gets access to hearing care by training community health workers to connect older adults with low-cost hearing technology.  The HEARS program works: participants’ hearing and communication improved significantly with a 2-hour program delivered entirely by community health workers using over-the-counter, low-cost hearing technology. Results of this randomized clinical trial were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2022. 

Now, Nieman is testing the model in other geographies and demographics, and is seeking partners and funders to scale the HEARS program nationally and internationally. Nieman is currently working with Haera Han, PhD, MSN, BSN, RN on bringing the HEARS program to Korean faith-based organizations in Maryland and Virginia, partnering with Esther Oh, MD, PhD of the Johns Hopkins Memory and Alzheimer's Treatment Center to provide hearing services and solutions to memory patients and their care partners, and collaborating with Jon Suen, PhD on delivering the HEARS Program in partnership with several Maryland Area Agencies on Aging.  

Creating Broad Awareness: the "Know Your Hearing" Public Health Campaign

The Cochlear Center is leading a public health campaign to raise awareness about the importance of monitoring, protecting, and optimizing hearing at all ages.  The “Know Your Hearing” public health campaign aims to establish the four-frequency pure tone average as the “Hearing Number” and encourage people to use this metric to understand their hearing, much in the way that visual acuity, blood pressure, step count and sleep quality are commonly used health and wellness metrics familiar to both clinicians and the lay public.

By knowing their Hearing Numbers, people can understand this important aspect of their health, track the changes to their hearing that occur naturally over time, and know when to use technologies to protect their hearing and hear better. 

Introducing the Hearing Number App

In early 2025, we launched a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School-branded smartphone app that allows consumers to learn their Hearing Number on both iOS and Android platforms.  The app is available around the world, except for mainland China, which has specific regulatory requirements, in English, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

This free, easy-to-use, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School-branded smartphone app allows consumers to learn their Hearing Numbers on either the iOS or Android platform. The test requires headphones or earbuds and takes about five minutes to complete in a quiet setting. The app does not collect user personal data and users can share the app without sharing personal data. Download the Hearing Number app via app stores for iOS and Android.

The Bloomberg School’s external affairs team is a trusted partner in amplifying campaign messages and calls to action through its own publications, distribution channels, and social media platforms, including:

Training, Programs, and Events

Trainees

The Cochlear Center’s current cohort of nine trainees are graduate students, audiologists, and physicians drawn from around the world who work with Cochlear Center mentors on research that illuminates the connections between sensory loss and healthy aging. Since the Center began, including this seventh, current cohort, Cochlear Center faculty have mentored nearly 50 trainees.  

2025 Graduates 

Kening Jiang, PhD, MHS received her doctorate in epidemiology. She is interested in studying the underlying mechanisms of cognitive aging, especially how potentially modifiable factors including sensory loss and sleep disturbances contribute to cognitive decline and dementia among older adults. 

Jason R. Smith, PhD, MS received his doctorate in epidemiology. He studies the contribution of multiple sensory impairments and vascular risk factors to cognitive aging and dementia.  His paper,  Vision Impairment and the Population Attributable Fraction of Dementia in Older Adults, published in JAMA Ophthalmology in September 2024, garnered media coverage from a number of outlets including Newsweek and Healthday. 

Breanna Langenek, AuD received her Doctorate of Audiology at The Ohio State University after completing her externship at the Bloomberg School. The American Academy of Audiology awarded her the James and Susan Jerger Excellence in Student Research Award. Langenek's research interests include ototoxicity and the epidemiology of hearing loss. 

Sally Chen, MSc received her Master of Science through the Epidemiology Department, specializing in Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis.

Tsion Gebre, MD, MPH is an otolaryngologist who completed her Master of Public Health degree. Her career aspirations focus on conducting hearing loss research, particularly in underserved populations, and providing high-quality clinical care to older patients.

Seminars

We continued our Seminar Series in the 2024-2025 academic year, hosting six speakers who shared expertise on a variety of topics around hearing, aging, and public health including federal dementia policy, hearing care accessibility and affordability, and sleep, aging and brain health, multisensory integration, and stigma in hearing care. 

2024-2025 Seminar Speakers included Susan Emmett, MD, MPH from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences;  Helen Lamont, PhD from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;  Sumit Dhar, PhD of Northwestern University; Adam Spira, PhD, MA of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Jeannette R Mahoney, PhD of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University; and Laura Nyblade, PhD of RTI International.  

Recordings of most seminars are available on the Seminar Series webpage.

Cochlear Center Research Day

Cochlear Center Research Day 2025 included a series of poster presentations from Cochlear Center trainees on their research throughout the year. The event featured a keynote address by guest speaker Laura Nyblade, PhD who presented "Disentangling Stigma: Applying Lessons from HIV to Hearing Care."

Doctoral student and Cochlear Center trainee Xi (Sissi) Wang, MPH, was given the Cochlear Center Epidemiology Scholarship for Sensory Health in Aging Award. 

Summer Fellows Program

The Johns Hopkins Cochlear Center Fellows Program in Aging, Hearing, and Public Health is designed to provide an overview of public health concepts, methods, and strategies to assist clinicians and researchers who are pursuing public health research and projects focused on addressing hearing loss in older adults.  The annual program targets a specific region and is held in partnership with a host institution. The program offers a blended classroom pedagogy of online lectures leading up to in-person discussions facilitated by Cochlear Center faculty.  Since its inception in 2019, the Cochlear Center has included 185 Fellows in its didactic programming and engaged in person with 142 of those clinicians and researchers in different regions of the world.

In Summer 2024, the Cochlear Center partnered with National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. After completing the virtual learning modules, 33 researchers and clinicians from around eastern/southeastern Asia in the field of hearing and aging joined Cochlear Center faculty at NYCU's campus in Taipei for lectures and small group discussions (pictured). 

Summer CHAMP

Led by core faculty Jennifer Deal, PhD and Nicholas Reed, Summer Cochlear Center Hearing and Aging Mentoring Program, or CHAMP, is an intensive, one-week program designed for pre-doctoral audiology, medical, or public health doctoral students to gain a foundation in concepts and methods that will lead to research careers addressing hearing loss, aging, and public health. The program includes didactic lectures, seminars, and journal clubs with Cochlear Center faculty, and students work in cross-disciplinary teams under the mentorship of faculty to produce a final research project.

Our 2024 CHAMPs (pictured) hailed from the University of Michigan, University of Texas at Dallas, Edinburgh Napier University, and the Pittsburgh Veterans Administration. Working in pairs and using Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study data, in five days they wrote two scientific papers that explored hearing loss associations with dementia and hospitalizations. CHAMP 2024 alumni presented their work at the February 2025 Annual Scientific and Technology Conference of the American Auditory Society.

Other Highlights

SENSE Network

The SENSE Network, founded by Cochlear Center core faculty Jennifer Deal, Frank Lin, and others, is an international consortium that meets quarterly to collaborate on research examining the role of sensory functioning - vision, hearing, olfaction, touch, and taste - on health and aging with the goal of accelerating research in this area via new collaborations and generating tangible scientific studies. Working groups within the Sense Network focus on deliverable goals such as white papers or conference abstracts geared toward a specific topic. 

This year, the SENSE Network created a novel resource for collaborators: a curated databank of studies with data that includes sensory measures, accessible via the network website.  

Learn more about SENSE

Visiting Faculty

This academic year we welcomed Humberto Yévenes Briones as Visiting Faculty. Briones is assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at the Universidad Autónoma de Madridas, where he investigates the effect of habitual diet on hearing loss.  Briones joined the Cochlear Center on a Fulbright scholarship where he worked with Pablo Martinez Amezcua examining the effect of hearing loss on frailty syndrome in two American cohort studies.