Meet Jerry Punch

Department: Communicative Sciences and Disorders

Type of research: Effectiveness of low-range amplification devices for the hearing impaired based on traditional prescriptive fitting methods.

Funding for research: Funding was provided by the Oticon Foundation, while equipment was provided by Frye Electronics of Oregon.

Basics of research: Susanna Love Callaway, a lifelong education alumna and international student from Denmark, took two courses from Punch and wanted to see whether low-range or mid-range amplification devices could be an acceptable substitution for traditional hearing aids.

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Professor's research tuned in on audiology

Jerry Punch never considered a career in audiology until he met Calvin Knobeloch.

Punch, a professor in MSU’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, was a student in a speech pathology course taught by Knobeloch, a then-adjunct professor at Wake Forest University.

“I liked the instructor a lot, but I didn’t particularly think speech pathology was really what I wanted to do,” he said. “The professor was interesting, so I took a second course and it was audiology.”

Punch worked with the Madison, Wisc.-based Thermo Nicolet Corporation in the late 1980s to develop and unveil the world’s first digital hearing aid.

In the mid-1990s, he created a multimedia CD looking at how hearing loss affects someone’s quality of life and said he planned to continue working on it to launch the project online.

“No vocational counselor told me to be an audiologist, that’s for sure,” he said, laughing. “I was actually told I should be an architect or aeronautical engineer.”

Punch graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wake Forest University, but went on to receive a master’s degree in audiology from Vanderbilt University and a doctorate in audiology from Northwestern University.

He said although audiology is a broad field of study, blending his interest of technology with helping others seemed like “a good way to apply my interests.”

“Audiology was just a field I felt I could combine my interests in technology with my interest in working with people and applying my technological interests to benefit people,” Punch said.

Published on Thursday, August 28, 2008