James David Miller, 90, of Bloomington died peacefully at Indiana University Health Hospice House on August 2, 2020. With him were his daughter Valerie and the loving concerns of many relatives and friends who could not be physically present because of the current pandemic.
Dr. Miller was raised in West Allis, Wisconsin in a family with three older siblings — Patricia, Joseph and Harry. He attended the University of Wisconsin, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology in 1951. He received his graduate training in that same field at Indiana University in Bloomington, earning his Ph.D. in 1957. He had a long and productive career in the field of hearing and deafness and also in the study of speech communication. During a postdoctoral appointment at Indiana University he completed a pioneering study of the damage to the structures of the ear caused by intense noise and the resulting permanent hearing loss. That work had a major influence on the establishment of the CDC/OSHA damage-risk criteria, noise levels above which businesses are legally required to provide hearing protection to employees.
In 1959 Jim was recruited by Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, MO, where he extended his research to studies of speech perception by persons with normal hearing and those with hearing loss. During more than 40 years at CID Jim served as mentor to dozens of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, many of whom went on to impactful careers at major research centers throughout the US. He rose from director of one of the research labs at CID to appointments as Director of Psychological Laboratories and as Director of Research. In 2003 Jim retired as Research Director Emeritus of CID and as Adj. Prof. of Otolaryngology, Speech and Hearing Sciences, and Psychology at Washington University, St. Louis.
In 2005, Jim returned to Bloomington where he joined Communication Disorders Technology, Inc. as Principal Scientist. At CDT he continued to conduct NIH-funded research, concentrating on training hearing-aid users to recognize speech more efficiently. This work grew into a multi-university study in which Jim coordinated the efforts of university centers, each using the Speech Perception Assessment and Training System (SPATS) that had been developed by Jim and his colleagues. Most recently, he devoted time to analyzing the data from this study and published two major articles based on his theoretical modeling of the associations between recognizing the elements of speech and overall understanding of meaningful sentences. He rejoined Indiana University as an Adjunct Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and taught occasional graduate courses.
Jim’s exceptional mentoring of students must have been partly a result of the experiences he had with his own mentors, Harry Harlow (known for “mother love in monkeys”) at the University of Wisconsin, who called Jim the best student he had ever had, and James Egan at Indiana University, who started Jim on his lifetime study of hearing and deafness.
In addition to an internationally recognized scientific career, Jim also found time for a range of other activities. He was an avid tennis player through his 80’s, and earned state rankings in his age group. He served as president of the AAA Municipal Golf and Tennis Club in Forest Park, St. Louis, where he helped to integrate that formerly all-white organization. He was an ardent student of US history, particularly of the Civil War, and had trod many of the battle fields of that conflict. He believed in striving for a more perfect union, and as a young man he participated in campus protests to demand equal opportunities and rights for Black students at Indiana University. Into his 80’s, he walked from house-to-house to get out the vote.
Jim is survived by his former wife Dolores, his daughters Valerie and Lucia (David Hanlon), of St. Louis, his son Harry of New York City and his granddaughter Rose Hoffman of Los Angeles.
A private memorial will be held later this year.
Memorial contributions may be made to Indiana University Foundation to support research on hearing loss in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Make gifts payable to “IU Foundation” and mail to IU Foundation, P.O. Box 6460, Indianapolis, IN 46206-6460. Please indicate “In memory of Dr. James D. Miller.” Alternately, contributions may be made to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or Emily’s List.
Messages of condolence may be expressed at IndianaGreenBurials.com
Kirupa Suthakar, PhD - Dr Kirupa Suthakar is a postdoctoral fellow at NIH/NIDCD, having formerly trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and doctoral student at Garvan Institute of Medical Research/UNSW Australia. Kirupa's interest in the mind and particular fascination by how we are able to perceive the world around us led her to pursue a research career in auditory neuroscience. To date, Kirupa's research has broadly focused on neurons within the auditory efferent circuit, which allow the brain to modulate incoming sound signals at the ear. Kirupa is active member of the spARO community, serving as the Chair Elect for 2021.
Charles C. Della Santina, PhD MD is a Professor of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he directs the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Implant Center and the Johns Hopkins Vestibular NeuroEngineering Laboratory.
Andrew Griffith received his MD and PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1992. He completed his general surgery internship and a residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Michigan in 1998. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Human Genetics as part of his training at the University of Michigan. In 1998, he joined the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) in the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). He served as a senior investigator, the chief of the Molecular Biology and Genetics Section, the chief of the Otolaryngology Branch, and the director of the DIR, as well as the deputy director for Intramural Clinical Research across the NIH Intramural Research Program. His research program identifies and characterizes molecular and cellular mechanisms of normal and disordered hearing and balance in humans and mouse models. Two primary interests of his program have been hearing loss associated with enlargement of the vestibular aqueduct, and the function of TMC genes and proteins. The latter work lead to the discovery that the deafness gene product TMC1 is a component of the hair cell sensory transduction channel. Since July of 2020, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean of Research and a Professor of Otolaryngology and Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
Gwenaëlle S. G. Géléoc obtained a PhD in Sensory Neurobiology from the University of Sciences in Montpellier (France) in 1996. She performed part of her PhD training at the University of Sussex, UK where she characterized sensory transduction in vestibular hair cells and a performed a comparative study between vestibular and cochlear hair cells. Gwenaelle continued her training as an electrophysiologist at University College London studying outer hair cell motility and at Harvard Medical School studying modulation of mechanotransduction in vestibular hair cells. As an independent investigator at the University of Virginia, she expanded this work and characterized the developmental acquisition of sensory transduction in mouse vestibular hair cells, the developmental acquisition of voltage-sensitive conductances in vestibular hair cells and the tonotopic gradient in the acquisition of sensory transduction in the mouse cochlea. This work along with quantitative spatio-temporal studies performed on several hair cell mechanotransduction candidates lead her to TMC1 and 2 and long-term collaborations with Andrew Griffith and Jeff Holt. Dr. Géléoc is currently Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology, at Boston Children’s Hospital where she continues to study molecular players involved in the development and function of hair cells of the inner ear and develops new therapies for the treatment of deafness and balance, with a particular focus on Usher syndrome.
Jeff Holt earned a doctorate from the Department of Physiology at the University of Rochester in 1995 for his studies of inward rectifier potassium channels in saccular hair cells. He went on to a post-doctoral position in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he characterized sensory transduction and adaptation in hair cells and developed a viral vector system to transfect cultured hair cells. Dr. Holt’s first faculty position was in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Virginia. In 2011 the lab moved to Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School. Dr. Holt is currently a Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology and Neurology in the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center. Dr. Holt and his team have been studying sensory transduction in auditory and vestibular hair cells over the past 20 years, with particular focus on TMC1 and TMC2 over the past 12 years. This work lead to the discovery that TMC1 forms the hair cell transduction channel. His work also focuses on development gene therapy strategies for genetic hearing loss.