The awardees will carry out a wide-field, medium deep multicolor survey, using the newly commissioned red-optimized CCD camera on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) with enhanced sensitivity at 1 micron. This survey will for the first time enable discovery of faint quasars at redshifts z > 7. They will combine the LBT sample with other high luminosity quasars at 6 < z < 8, and will carry out spectroscopic follow-up observations in far red and near-infrared wavelengths. The main science goals of this work are to constrain the accretion history of the earliest supermassive black holes in the Universe, and to determine whether the intergalactic medium becomes largely neutral by z ~6.5 - 8. Broader impacts of this work include research training for graduate and undergraduate students, follow-up studies of newly discovered quasars, and serendipitous discovery of other types of objects such as brown dwarfs.