Making Waves: Electrophysiology, Dolphins, and Advice

By Robert (Bob) Burkard and Bre Myers

This article is a part of the March/April 2020, Volume 32, Number 2, Audiology Today issue. I recently had the opportunity to do an email “interview” with Robert (Bob) Burkard, PhD, a professor at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. His most recent project caught my attention at the American Auditory Society meeting in March 2019, and he agreed to take some time and answer a few questions on his work. Dr. Burkard’s voluminous list of publications fills 13 pages of his curriculum vitae and spans 39 years.

Dr. Burkard, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to answer a few questions for Audiology Today. Can you highlight some of your favorite lines of study over your career?

I see my research as one main line of research that has focused on the effects of various stimulus manipulations to elicit the auditory brainstem response (ABR), which has over time involved different collaborators (including students) and animal species. I have, on occasion, veered off my ABR path and done some auditory steady-state-evoked response (ASSR) studies, but those (in my view) are just overlapping ABRs at the high modulation rates I have typically focused on. I have also had the opportunity to collaborate in a few functional imaging studies and some vestibular/balance work. Taking a primacy and a recency perspective, I will bookend my research career to date and pick my doctoral research and my current bottlenose dolphin research as my favorite lines of research. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for my master’s and PhD in audiology. I received an amazing education in Madison. Bob Goldstein taught me about auditory-evoked potentials. Terry Wiley gave me a firm foundation in instrumentation and acoustic-impedance measures and Ray Karlovich taught me acoustics. I still use this foundational knowledge in my research efforts. They gave me the tools I needed to have a research career. I also interacted with the faculty in engineering and neurophysiology and prominent hearing scientists (e.g., Bill Rhode, Dan Geisler, John Brugge) took the time to educate me in areas such as auditory physiology and signals and systems. They taught me what I needed to pursue a career in auditory physiology and, without that knowledge, I would have been severely limited in establishing a research program.