Professor Blake Wilson
Professor Blake Wilson is the Director of the Duke Hearing Center and is an Adjunct or Consulting Professor in each of three departments at Duke: Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He has been involved in the development of the cochlear implant (CI) for over four decades and is the inventor of most of the processing strategies used with the present-day CIs. He has been the Principal Investigator for 27 projects, 13 for the USA’s National Institutes of Health. One of his papers, in the journal Nature, is the most cited publication in the field of hearing implants. He or he and his teams or colleagues have been recognised with many awards and honours including but not limited to the 2013 Lasker~DeBakey Award, the 2015 Russ Prize, the 2016 Eduard Rhein Technology Prize, the 2017 Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal, the 2021 North Carolina Award for Science, and the 2024 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology.
Additionally, Blake is the only person who has received the following three awards from Duke: the Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) from the Pratt School of Engineering, the DAA from the University as a whole, and the Honorary Alumnus Award from the School of Medicine. Wilson also is a member of the USA’s National Academy of Engineering and is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Acoustical Society of America, the USA’s National Academy of Inventors, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His degrees include a PhD in Electrical Engineering and two higher doctorates in science and engineering, plus two honorary doctorates in medicine, and his most recent activities include service as the Chair of the Lancet Commission on Hearing Loss, a large international effort whose foremost aim is to rein in the presently high and growing burden of hearing loss worldwide.
