Discovery, Prevention, Therapeutics. One of the Global Center's main R&D strategies is to combine the knowledge and practices of multiple scientific and clinical research disciplines to attack the highly prevalent, complex communication and biomedical problems of hearing impairment, deafness, age-related hearing loss, communication systems, speech perception, and voice quality. These multiple disciplines include audiology, bioengineering, biochemistry, biomedical imaging, cellular and molecular biology, electrical engineering, electrophysiology, gene therapy, genetics, microsystems engineering, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, psychoacoustics, signal processing, speech science, and voice science.