Michael F. Dorman received his Ph.D. in Experimental Child and Developmental Psychology (with a Linguistics minor) from the University of Connecticut in 1971. A Fellow of the Acoustical Society of American, he is currently Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science and the program in Linguistics at Arizona State University. Professor Dorman is the author of over 150 publications in areas including (i) speech perception by infants, adults, hearing-impaired listeners and listeners fit with cochlear implants, (ii) cortical lateralization of function and (iii) neural plasticity. His work on cochlear implants has been supported continuously by the NIH since 1989.

Professor Dorman met his first cochlear implant patient in 1985. The patient used a 4-channel, Ineraid, analogue processor manufactured by Symbion, Inc. in Salt Lake City, Utah. The patient, Scott Shepherd, was the first patient in the clinical trials of the Ineraid and for many years was the highest performing implant patient in the United States with word scores of near 70 % correct. In his first conversation with Scott, Professor Dorman asked Scott to turn his back, so that he couldn’t read lips, and Scott understood the conversation perfectly. This convinced the Professor that implants were a lot more interesting than what he had been working on previously.

Books By Author

• Better Hearing with Cochlear Implants, Studies at the Research Triangle Institute