By Brad A. Stach and Jerry L. Northern
This article is a part of the January/February 2023, Volume 35, Number 1, Audiology Today issue.
Happy 35th anniversary to the American Academy of Audiology! Many of you reading this were not yet born 35 years ago, and so we want to give you our perspective on our founder and champion, James (Jim) Jerger, PhD, and on the early days of what has become the world’s largest organization of, by, and for audiologists. Some of you reading this watched the early formation of the Academy, signed up and joined immediately, and then witnessed the spectacular trajectory of both the profession and the organization. For all of you, we hope to provide a nostalgic reminder of what it was like in the days before cell phones and the internet and in the days when some outsiders actually identified us as speech pathologists who did “hearing work.”
The Academy started, ironically some might think, at the 1987 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) convention in New Orleans. There, a panel was scheduled in the program to address the challenges faced by the audiology profession and to forecast its future. The final speaker of that session was James F. Jerger, then director of audiology and bioacoustics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. At the end of his talk, Dr. Jerger concluded his presentation by proposing that audiologists should break away from speech-language pathology, thereby setting the wheels in motion for what was to become the American Academy of Audiology.
But before we tell you the rest of that story, we thought we would start with a bit of history about our founder, Jim Jerger, a true legend of the profession of audiology, who has contributed so remarkably to both its scientific basis and its clinical practices.
Jim Jerger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He relocated to the Chicago area in the late 1940s to attend Northwestern University. There, he received his baccalaureate degree in 1951, his master’s degree in audiology in 1952, and his PhD in audiology in 1954. He joined the faculty after graduation and quickly climbed the ranks, becoming director of the Audiology Research Laboratory while still in his 20s.
Dr. Jerger left Northwestern in 1961 and spent a year at the VA in Washington, DC, before moving to Houston, Texas, to become director of research at the Houston Speech and Hearing Center. After a few short years, he moved across the street and became professor of audiology and director of the Division of Audiology and Speech Pathology at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Dr. Jerger spent the next 30 years of his career at the Baylor College of Medicine, building a powerful research program, strong clinical service, and a prominent academic program. Many credit the outcomes from those Baylor years as the cornerstone of modern diagnostic audiology. He retired from the Baylor College of Medicine in 1997 and has stayed busy in his retirement as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he directed a very active
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