Peter Dallos

Peter Dallos (born 1934) is the John Evans Professor of Neuroscience Emeritus, Professor Emeritus of Audiology, Biomedical Engineering and Otolaryngology at Northwestern University. His research pertained to the neurobiology, biophysics and molecular biology of the cochlea. This work provided the basis for the present understanding of the role of outer hair cells in hearing, that of providing amplification in the cochlea. After his retirement in 2012, he became a professional sculptor.

An only child, Dallos was born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary. He attended the Technical University of Budapest from 1953 to 1956, majoring in electrical engineering. After participating in the 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, he escaped and immigrated to the United States. He finished his undergraduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1958), followed by MS (1959) and Ph.D (1962) degrees from Northwestern University. He was one of the first doctoral students to specialize in biomedical engineering (adviser R.W. Jones) under the aegis of the Electrical Engineering department. His thesis work on modeling predictive eye movements is still being cited... Upon completing his degree, he accepted a position with Raymond Carhart in Audiology at Northwestern and became a full professor seven years later. His entire faculty career, which spanned fifty years, was at Northwestern University. In 1977-78 he spent a sabbatical year at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, working with Åke Flock. In 1991 he was recruited to be the founding chair of the new Department of Neurobiology and Physiology. Later he served terms as Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and as Vice President for Research. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Auditory Neuroscience (1994–97), served on the Council of Neurology Institute of the NIH (1984–87) and was President of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO; 1992–93), while also serving on numerous other advisory committees and boards and holding various editorships.

Early work pertained to elucidating the properties and modeling of the acoustic reflex and some excursions into psychophysics. By 1965 he established the Auditory Physiology Laboratory where he and some seventy doctoral students, postdocs and colleagues have produced a body of work that can be characterized in various categories.

[2.1] Contemporary interpretation of the origin and properties of gross electrical responses of the cochlea and auditory nerve. This work forms the basis of present-day measurements and understanding of compound electrical responses of the auditory periphery. The work was summarized in the 1973 monograph: The Auditory Periphery.

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