Page 36 - Winter 2009

Mario Svirsky
Mario A. Svirsky received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University in 1988. Since 2005 he has been at the Department of Otolaryngology and New York University School of Medicine, as the first Noel L. Cohen Professor of Hearing Science. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a member of the Collegium Otolaryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
His research interests include basic research in speech perception, auditory psychophysics, and speech production; the development of mathematical mod- els of speech perception, and the study of cochlear implantation outcomes. He is interested in both clinical and scientific aspects of cochlear implantation, and what the study of this clinical population can tell us about more general phenom- ena such as speech perception in normal hearing listeners, and adaptation to a distorted or degraded sensory input.
Diemer De Vries is new President of AES
Diemer De Vries has assumed the office of President of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for the peri- od 2009-2010. He was elected in 2008 and served one year as President-Elect.
Diemer De Vries was born in The Netherlands in 1945. He received his M.Sc. degree at TU Delft in 1971, and
Diemer De Vries
after graduation, joined the staff of the Laboratory of Acoustics. During his career as a university researcher he worked on projects in room acoustics, building acoustics, and seismic signal processing. In 1984, he received a Ph.D. degree on a thesis in the latter field. As an associate professor, he coordinates the research on array technology-based wavefield analysis and synthesis in audio and acoustics. In 1976, he was a visiting researcher at the Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia. Since 1981, he has taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, at the Department of Music Registration. In 2001, he fulfilled the “Edgard Varese” guest professorship at TU Berlin, introducing the wavefield synthesis concept in the world of com- puter music.
Diemer De Vries is a member of the Acoustical Society of America. He received an AES Fellowship Award for his contributions to the implementa- tion of wavefield synthesis in 1999 and is an associate technical editor on room acoustics for the AES Journal. He is past chair of the Dutch Acoustical Association and of the Netherlands Section of the AES. \[Excerpted with permission from J. Audio Eng. Soc. 57, October 2009. Photo credit: Audio Engineering Society.\]
Earl Williams awarded Per Bruel Gold Medal for Noise Control and Acoustics
The Per Bruel Gold Medal for Noise Control and Acoustics was awarded in November, 2009 to Earl G. Williams, Senior Scientist for Structural Acoustics
Earl Williams
at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., “for pioneering work in the development and applica- tion of nearfield acoustical holography, which has provided the ability to control sound radiation in a wide variety of applications.” The award was established by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in honor of Dr. Per Bruel, who pioneered the development of sophisti- cated noise and vibration measuring and processing equipment. The medal recog- nizes eminent achievement and extraor- dinary merit in the field of noise control and acoustics, including useful applica- tions of the principles of noise control and acoustics to the art and science of mechanical engineering.
Dr. Williams has worked at NRL for the past 27 years. His research was for- mally recognized by NRL as one of the most innovative technologies to emerge from the laboratory in 75 years. He grad- uated in 1979 with a Ph.D. in Acoustics from The Pennsylvania State University, where he was one of Eugen Skudrzyk’s last students. He received a master’s degree in applied physics under Ted Hunt at Harvard University in 1968. Dr. Williams is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and has been associ- ate editor for The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America for the past 9 years.
Tyrone Porter wins NSF BRIGE Award
Professor Tyrone Porter received a Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) award from the National Science Foundation in support of his project “The role of vaporized perfluo-
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