Blake Wilson is a co-inventor and principal developer of the modern cochlear implant, a medical device that enables hearing for deaf or nearly deaf people. More than a million people worldwide have received cochlear implants for one or both ears, and nearly all of them are able to converse on telephones, without needing visual cues such as lipreading.
Wilson developed a signal processing strategy called “continuous interleaved sampling” that improved the clarity of speech and made hearing dramatically better for implant users. Those advances are widely hailed as the spark that moved cochlear implants from an experimental treatment into mainstream clinical practice.
Wilson and his co-inventors have received numerous honors, including the 2013 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, known as the “American Nobel,” and the 2015 Russ Prize, the world’s top honor in bioengineering.
“Hundreds of talented and dedicated engineers, physicians and scientists made cochlear implants possible, and I was supremely fortunate to be a part of the overall effort,” Wilson said in 2017.
Wilson co-founded the Duke Cochlear Implant Program in 1984 and the Duke Hearing Center in 2008, which he now directs. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and his degrees include a B.S. and a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Duke, as well as two higher doctorates (in science and in engineering) and two honorary doctorates (in medicine) from renowned universities in Sweden, Australia, Spain and the UK.
Wilson is the only person to have received all of the following awards from Duke: the Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) from the university as a whole, the DAA from the Pratt School of Engineering, and the Honorary Alumnus Award from the School of Medicine. Wilson’s father, Hank Wilson, was also a Duke engineer, having graduated in 1947 with Edmund T. Pratt, namesake of the school.
