“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.