Ratnanather honored for promoting diversity in STEM

Tilak Ratnanather, associate research professor of biomedical engineering, received an honorable mention and a prize of $10,000 for the Provost’s Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity.

Ratnanather earned this honor for his work developing mentoring programs that provide opportunities in STEM for deaf and hard of hearing individuals.

“We still have a long way to go to overcome the societal challenges of hearing loss: isolation, invisibility, and ignorance,” says Ratnanather. “Fortunately the advent of cochlear implants, digital hearing aids, and captioning with automatic speech recognition can go a long way for more than half of the 400,000 college students in the United States and many more abroad who do not self-disclose their hearing loss, and yet face barriers in college.”