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Deaf Scientists Hit by Drastic NIH Cuts — The Research Community Must Support Them

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

I knew funding cuts would come to the ‘deaf-scientist pipeline’ — a constellation of five programmes that support deaf students from secondary school to postdoctoral research, all based in Rochester, New York. In April, however, I was still devastated by the flurry of formal terminations of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that support four of the programmes, amounting to 80% of the system’s collective funding.

Wyatte Hall Named to Forbes’ Accessibility 100

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Wyatte Hall, PhD, an expert in language deprivation as a social public health epidemic in deaf communities, and assistant professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), was named to Forbes’ inaugural Accessibility 100 list. Announced today, the list recognizes the “100 top innovators and impact-makers in the field of accessibility.”

Learners on Location: Meet Michelle Koplitz

Monday, April 14, 2025

In the first episode of Learners on Location, we meet Michelle Koplitz, a graduate student in our Translational Biomedical Science PhD program, and her longtime mentor, Wyatte Hall.

From WXXINews: How Locally Developed AI Tools Are Helping Parents of Deaf Children Learn ASL

Saturday, February 15, 2025

The first five years of a child’s life are crucial for language development — shaping cognitive abilities, enhancing communication skills, and supporting social interactions. Within the Deaf community, 90 percent of Deaf children are born to hearing parents. Their child may be the first Deaf person a parent ever meets. Supporting hearing parents to gain fluency in American Sign Language (ASL) can have a significant benefit on language development for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. University of Rochester researchers Zhen Bai and Wyatte Hall are developing AI-powered, augmented reality tools to help parents of Deaf children learn ASL. They’ve been working with the Deaf community to develop and test the software, including early collaborations with the Rochester School of the Deaf. Guest host Sarah Abbamonte explores the new technology and its implications with the team.