Duke biomedical engineer Blake Wilson has been named a 2026 laureate of the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology, administered by the Broad Institute, sharing the honour with four fellow pioneers of the cochlear implant. The prize recognises novel technologies that have improved human health, and few qualify as clearly as a device credited with bringing hearing to more than one million deaf and nearly deaf people around the world.
Wilson's signature contribution was in signal processing. Working at Duke and at what is now RTI International, he and his team developed a pulsing method that staggers the electrical signals delivered by closely spaced electrodes, reducing interference between them and markedly clarifying the sound that patients perceive. That approach became a foundation of how modern cochlear implants encode speech, and it transformed the device's real-world usefulness.
The Merkin Prize joins a long roll of recognition for Wilson, including the 2013 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the 2015 Russ Prize, the 2024 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology and the 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He completed his undergraduate engineering degree at Duke in 1974, co-founded the Duke Cochlear Implant Program in 1984, and remains closely tied to the university's biomedical engineering community.