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have sealed the deal. Javel then recruited the author of this article, a postdoctoral fellow working with David Green, to establish a research program in psychoacoustics.
After a three-year planning period, the initial staff of the hospital moved to Omaha in 1975 and 1976, working out of temporary quarters until a new building was completed in Feb- ruary 1977. Because the BTNRH was a totally new institution, the building (see Figure 1) was designed and construction was completed before most of the staff members who would occupy the building were recruited.
The highest priorities in 1976 were to recruit a permanent research director and to obtain additional funding for the research program. Many people contributed to the initial development of the BTNRH, but the research program owes its success to Charles Watson and support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Watson was recruited from the Central Institute for the Deaf during the fall of 1976 and moved to the hospital as director of research in January 1977. He was instrumental in the recruitment of additional laboratory direc- tors, the development of initial grant applications, and, most of all, in establishing the tone of the research program, including its academic orientation and high standards for performance.
In 1976, the NIH announced a new initiative for institutions currently without NIH funds to provide three years of research start-up funds with a total budget of $300,000. They invited applications in any area of research supported by the NIH and planned to award four such grants. Watson and the other early members of the research staff submitted an application for the March 1, 1977, deadline, only a month after they had moved into the new building. It was the first application for federal funds submitted by the Boys Town organization.
The application was funded with a start date of December 1, 1977. It provided operating funds for the existing laborato- ries, funds for equipment, and initial operating funds for new laboratories in communication engineering, neuroanatomy, and speech/language, with support for senior salaries guar- anteed by the BTNRH. Recruitment of additional staff was initiated during this period and the day that word of funding was received from the NIH, Richard Lippmann accepted the position in communication engineering and W. Bruce Warr accepted the position in neuroanatomy. Ronald Netsell later accepted the speech/language position, joined immediately
by Raymond Kent.
NIH approval and support for the new research program pro- vided validation that was critical in an organization with no prior experience in research. In addition to the funding, the positive external review of grant applications provided strong feedback to the Boys Town organization regarding the value of the proposed work. It also provided individual laboratory directors the freedom to pursue research topics of great inter- est to their peers on grant-review panels that might have been difficult to explain to the Boys Town Board of Directors.
Richard Lippmann and Bruce Warr arrived in 1978. Lippmann was interested in the development of new algorithms for hear- ing aid signal processing, whereas Warr had done seminal work to map the efferent innervation of the inner ear. Ron Netsell and Ray Kent moved from the University of Wisconsin the following year to establish a speech physiology laboratory (see Figure 2). By the end of 1978, Javel, Jesteadt, Watson, and Warr had all obtained NIH funding for their research programs, an excellent electronics shop and other research infrastructures had been developed, and the BTNRH had hosted a national research conference combined with a meet- ing of the Committee on Hearing and Bioacoustics of the National Academy of Sciences (Brookhouser and Bordley, 1980). William Kimberling also joined us that year to develop one of the first research programs in the area of the genetics of hearing loss. Kimberling went on to do pioneering work at the BTNRH on the identification of genes causing Usher syndrome, the leading cause of combined deafness and blind- ness in developed countries (Kimberling and Möller, 1995).
Figure 2. Left to right: Charles Watson, Richard Lippmann, and Raymond Kent discussing the acoustics of the vocal tract, 1980.
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