Mario A. Svirsky PhD

Mario Svirsky is the first Noel L. Cohen Professor of Hearing Science and Vice-Chairman of Research at the Department of Otolaryngology, New York University School of Medicine. He got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University in 1988. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT’s Speech Communication Group, where he stayed as a Research Scientist until 1995. From 1995 to 2005 he was at the Department of Otolaryngology, Indiana University School of Medicine, with a joint appointment at Purdue University’s Departments of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Svirsky joined NYU in 2005. 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. He was an elected Co-Chairman of the 2003 Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses. He is Editor-in-Chief, Emeritus, of the journal Ear and Hearing and he also serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. Svirsky’s research has been funded since 1992 by grants from the National Institutes of Health, private foundations, and the Uruguayan government. It has also received technical and in-kind support from cochlear implant and hearing aid companies as well as from Sun Microsystems.

His research interests include basic research in speech perception and auditory psychophysics, the development of mathematical models of speech perception, the study of speech production and language development, the study of communication outcomes after cochlear implantation, and the development of software/hardware based fitting tools to optimize cochlear implant fitting. He is interested in both the clinical and scientific aspects of cochlear implantation, and what the study of this clinical population can tell us about more general phenomena such as speech perception in normal hearing listeners, and adaptation to a distorted or degraded sensory input.