Blake S. Wilson

Blake S. Wilson is an American doctor best known for his role in developing the cochlear implant. Initially, he trained in electrical engineering, but later he turned his interest to hearing research. In 1977, he joined the Research Triangle Institute team, and in the 1980s his team developed a speech coding method for cochlear implants. In 2013, he received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. In January 2015, The National Academy of Engineering awarded Wilson a share of the 2015 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize for “engineering cochlear implants that enable the deaf to hear". On January 30, 2015 Wilson received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine at Uppsala University for his contribution "in the field of cochlear implant research. These implants replace the sense of hearing in deaf and gravely hearing-impaired people, and are one of the greatest medical advances of modern times."

Blake S. Wilson, is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s departments of surgery, biomedical engineering, and electrical and computer engineering, and also a co-director of the Duke Hearing Center. He began his full time work on cochlear implants in the 1980s when he developed the “continuous interleaved sampling” system. This model made it possible for cochlear implant recipients to understand words and sentences with far greater clarity than before. Wilson’s breakthrough provided the basis for sound-processing strategies used widely in today’s cochlear implants and resulted in a rapid expansion in the number of deaf and nearly deaf persons who have received a cochlear implant in one or both ears.