Eric Hunter

MSU Foundation Professors College of Communication Arts and Sciences

• MSU Foundation Professor

• Communicative Sciences and Disorders

Bio

Eric Hunter is an MSU Foundation Professor, and currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, with a home appointment of professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders. He is also the Director of the Trifecta Initiative for Interdisciplinary Health Research (a joint research initiative of the College of Engineering, College of Nursing, and the College of Communication Arts & Sciences). For the last 20 years, Dr. Hunter's NIH-supported research has focused on occupational voice use, particularly examining voice disorders in elementary and secondary school teachers.

Dr. Hunter earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Brigham Young University, with an emphasis in acoustics and vibration. His master’s thesis, which focused on designing and testing computer-generated visual aids, shifted his interest from general acoustics to speech acoustics. He completed his training in the area of speech science and received his doctorate from the University of Iowa. His dissertation topic used continuum mechanics to model vocal fold posturing.

In addition to occupational voice use, Hunter’s research interests also include signal processing, biomechanics of speech articulators and biomechanical models of the vocal system, and muscle mechanics and muscle models. Broader academic interests include recording techniques, speech perception, musical acoustics and machine recognition of speech. Dr. Hunter has published more than 115 publications and book chapters and has been a part of more than 250 presentations. His expertise on the vocal health of teachers and the aging voice has been consulted in newspaper and television interviews across the United States and Asia, including The New York Times and MSNBC.