Professor Blake S. Wilson is the Co-Director (with Debara L. Tucci, MD) of the Duke Hearing Center and is an adjunct professor in each of two departments at Duke, Surgery and Electrical Engineering. He also is the chief strategy advisor for MED-EL Medical Electronics GmbH of Innsbruck, Austria, and a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in the Research Triangle Park, NC, USA. He has been involved in the development of the cochlear implant (CI) for the past three decades, and is the inventor of many of the signal processing strategies used with the present-day devices. One of his papers, in the journal Nature, is the most highly cited publication on studies with CI patients. He has served as the Principal Investigator for 25 projects, including 13 projects for the National Institutes of Health. Prof. Wilson and the teams he has directed have been recognized with a high number of awards and honors, most notably the 1996 Discover Award for Technological Innovation (to Wilson); the American Otological Societys Presidents Citation in 1997 for Major contributions to the restoration of hearing in profoundly deaf persons (to the RTI team); the 2007 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke (to Wilson); and the Neel Distinguished Research Lectureship at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery (to Wilson). Prof. Wilson has been the guest of honor at 12 international conferences, the Chairman for two other international conferences, and a keynote or invited speaker at more than 170 additional conferences.
