Face to Watch

Rob Nutt '98 remembers a poster that hung on his older brother's bedroom wall. On it, a skier careened down the side of an untouched snowy cliff under the words, "Find a way or make a way!" The message fell on deaf ears—and made a big impact. Born with a progressive bilateral hearing loss, Nutt, now a student at Dartmouth Medical School, is living out the poster's message. In 2000 he received a Schweitzer Fellowship for Community Service, a grant that allowed him to research issues faced by deaf children in Vermont and New Hampshire, where he discovered that statesponsored services weren't uniformly reaching rural populations. To that end, Nutt founded Upper Valley DEAF (Deaf/Hard of Hearing Empowerment and Advocacy for Families), a parent-and-child group that organizes discussions with nationally recognized experts on deaf education, culture and child psychology. Nutt is also exploring technical advancements. He's worked with Thayer School students and a hearing aid manufacturer to develop an electronic stethoscope and an operating room microphone system, both for use with his assistive-listening device. His latest project: developing a system that uses voice-recognition technology to display words in real-time onto a small headmounted screen that could be used by deaf people in lectures, conferences and even movie theaters. —Julie Sloane '99