Hazel Goedhart • Co-Founder of Tinnitus Quest
Foreword
When I was in high school, I dreamed of going to the University of Oxford. Something about its ancient history and dedication to intellectual rigor really spoke to me. I was possibly smart enough to have made it in, but I was not a hardworking student by any means. So that dream ended up passing me by. (And don’t worry, I’m doing just fine these days.)
But you can imagine my delight when, decades later, I found myself walking around the beautiful town of Oxford on my way to speak to a professor at that very same university about a study that I had helped make happen.
I visited Professor Cleveland and his team to see where our transcranial ultrasound study, the study that you helped fund, will be carried out. Please join me inside the lab and let me introduce you to some of the team members.
At the end of the video, I also share some thoughts on how we can improve our grantmaking in future and make things happen even quicker. I talk about how we can measure the success of the study and how, if you live in or near Oxford, you yourself might be able to take part.
I go into quite a bit of the nitty-gritty in the video, prioritizing transparency with you, our audience and donors, over making this a slick and quick video. We’d prefer to give more rather than less information.
One interesting piece of background that isn’t mentioned in the video is that, before agreeing to give this grant, we pushed to increase the number of study participants from six to fifteen in the first phase and from ten to twenty in the second. It’s great to see how patient-driven research can work like this in practice. And we truly hope this study will be patient-driven in every which way.
We will report on the study on a quarterly basis once it kicks off, which will happen as soon as ethics approval from the university comes through. We look forward to keeping you up to date on this exciting study!
