NIDCD Grantee Receives Prestigious James Jerger Career Award

NIDCD grantee Robert H. Margolis, Ph.D., is a recipient of the 2007 James Jerger Career Award for Research in Audiology from the American Academy of Audiology. The award honors individuals who have had a distinguished career in the field of audiology not only as productive researchers but also as significant contributors to the practice or teaching of audiology. The award will be presented to Dr. Margolis at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Audiology in Denver on April 18, 2007.

Throughout his career, Dr. Margolis has been involved in “translational research,” applying knowledge gained from basic laboratory studies to his clinical practice. Since 1975, he has advocated the use of quantitative measures for the study of middle ear function, a practice that is used today and for which he is one of the world’s leading authorities.

Dr. Margolis’s NIDCD-funded research involves developing and evaluating an automated method for testing hearing. Each year, audiologists around the country manually administer more than five million word recognition tests to people who are being tested for hearing loss. Dr. Margolis is developing a computerized clinical speech recognition test that will automatically interpret test scores. The automated method is designed to achieve test results that are comparable to those obtained by expert audiologists, while standardizing the method, eliminating errors, increasing efficiency, and decreasing cost.

Dr. Margolis is currently a professor of audiology in the department of otolaryngology at the University of Minnesota. He has published numerous scholarly articles on the middle ear, diagnostic audiology, and various topics related to otitis media. For more information on Dr. Margolis’s research, please see: http://www.ent.umn.edu/ent/researchfaculty/margolis/home.html

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