Blake S. Wilson

Blake S. Wilson (* 1948 ) is an American engineer and pioneer of the cochlear implant .

Wilson graduated from Duke University with a degree from the Pratt School of Engineering. From 1974 to 2001 he was at the Research Triangle Institute (now RTI International) in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, where he was a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Audio Prothesis Research. He developed a speech coding method for cochlear implants (Continuous Interleaved Sampling, CIS), which is modeled on the frequency mapping in the human ear and which significantly improved the speech understanding of patients with implants in the late 1980s. He is adjunct professor at Duke University (in the three faculties of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Surgery) and co-director of the Duke Hearing Center with Debara Tucci. He is also doing research with the Austrian company MED-EL.

In 2013 he received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with Graeme Clark and Ingeborg Hochmair-Desoyer . In 2014 these three were awarded the Russ Prize of the National Academy of Engineering together with Erwin Hochmair and Michael M. Merzenich . Wilson, Hochmair and Hochmair-Desoyer were awarded the Eduard Rhein Prize in 2016, and in 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Wilson is an honorary professor at the University of Warwick.

Web links

• Homepage, Duke University
• To the Lasker Award, Duke University
• Appreciation from MED-EL