At the start of this new year, I've been thinking about how I got to where I am in my career. While I've had the privilege of working with many amazing and talented people, the two most important people who shaped who I am professionally are Neal Viemeister and Rodney Perkins.
Neal Viemeister, who passed away in 2020, trained me to be a scientist. I came to his lab after finishing my PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, where my research applied digital signal processing to auditory neural processing. Neal's lab in the psychology department of the University of Minnesota was (arguably) the top psychoacoustic lab in the country at the time. What helped with the transition from engineering to psychology was the way in which Neal applied signal detection theory to his thinking about the performance of the human auditory system, along with his rigorous and mathematical approach to basic auditory perception research. Neal helped me discover that while engineering is about solving problems, science is about identifying important questions and developing elegant solutions to gather data that can answer them.
Neal engendered robust scientific debates in his lab. Every week those of us in his lab would argue over our ideas on the function of auditory perception and the meaning of our latest data, and Neal would bet a cookie on who was right if he disagreed with our hypotheses. He didn't care if he was right or wrong in these situations but enjoyed the debate and working through the theoretical arguments. Neal wasn't dogmatic about his scientific beliefs, but he made us deeply justify why our theories made sense and our experiments were the right ones to answer our hypotheses. He would always frame these discussions with a razor-sharp application of logic--imagine applying the "five whys" to scientific debate. Neal let us explore our ideas while he nudged us towards the best ways to design experiments, still letting us figure things out for ourselves.
There was no one I was more eager to talk to at scientific conferences than Neal because he would bring clarity to how the latest research fit into our current world-view of hearing science and provide meaningful alternate explanations for findings that were presented, often illuminating gaps in thinking, flaws in experimental design or missed hypotheses by the researchers at the conference. Debating science with Neal was a joy that I continued long after I left his lab to join the hearing aid industry.
If Neal was responsible for the scientist part of me, then Rodney Perkins was responsible for the entrepreneurial side. Rodney is one of the most successful medical device entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. I was privileged to work at three companies that he founded (ReSound, SoundID and Earlens), help him start one of them and significantly grow another. Rodney has founded a dozen (and counting) medical device companies in Silicon Valley, all resulting from his finding unmet needs in hearing health and developing solutions that often benefited other fields of health care.
Rodney embodies the prototypical entrepreneur. He identifies unmet needs and continually iterates ideas for solutions until he comes upon one that not only works but is practical and implementable in medical practice. When we were applying Bluetooth technology to hearing aid technology at SoundID in 2002, Rodney explained that most innovation in the Valley resulted from finding technology and solutions in one field and applying them to another; the secret for success was identifying those opportunities and timing it so that the resulting solution can be successfully commercialized. Rodney emphasized that you need to have a deep understanding of unmet needs in health care so that you can always be on the lookout for possible solutions emerging in other fields.
Being in meetings with Rodney almost always exposed me to the creative process in action. Rodney would offer idea after idea on how one might solve the problem being discussed, never focusing on the obvious or easy fix but on creative solutions born out of new ways of thinking about the problem. He constantly sketched new ideas and solutions to problems in his notebooks, which were incredible to see, and created an endless resource for scientists and engineers to investigate and prototype solutions.
In addition to seeing the innovation process firsthand with Rodney, I also observed the stoic nature required to be successful in the startup world. In a world known for hot-headed CEOs and egos causing chaos within their companies, Rodney dealt gracefully with every setback. Whether it was technical setbacks in a prototypes, challenges with VC funding, or any of the hundred issues that arise when starting and building a company, Rodney took everything with a calm demeanor. Yet he was persistent in driving progress towards what he wanted to accomplish, continuing to push where others might give up and focus on something else. This ethic was embodied in a plaque that he gave to early employees in his startups which read "Make It Happen", encouraging everyone to find and implement solutions to problems, to accomplish yourself that which is important and not stand on the sidelines waiting for someone else to do it. As Rodney said many times and as he embodied himself, the hard part of innovation and entrepreneurship isn't developing ideas; what is the difficult and challenging part is the execution and bringing the ideas to the market for people to use--making it happen. He instilled this ethos in people around him: to not wait for someone else to solve problems that you see, but to solve them yourself. I took this to heart in 2004 when I realized that there was an unmet need in the hearing aid industry for a translational research center: a place that would take basic hearing science and translate it into solutions for audiologists and those with hearing loss. I took inspiration from the Make It Happen plaque sitting on my desk, and from years of watching Rodney make it happen, and wrote a business plan for such a venture and sent it to all of the major hearing aid companies. A year later, I opened the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California–I made it happen.
Thank you, Neal Viemeister and Rodney Perkins, for the inspiration and guidance that you've provided me in my career, which would not be what it is today without your impact.