Eric J. Hunter Ph.D.

Eric Hunter currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Communication Arts and Sciences as well as the Director of the Trifecta Initiative (a joint research initiative of the College of Engineering, College of Nursing, and the College of Com Art & Science); his home department is Communicative Sciences and Disorders. Dr. Hunter came to MSU from the National Center for Voice and Speech, where he served as Deputy Executive Director for six years.

For the last 15 years, Dr. Hunter has researched occupational voice use, specifically examining voice disorders in elementary and secondary school teachers. The goal of his current NIH-funded research is to quantify the risk for and recovery from tissue damage, as well as to ascertain why female teachers appear to be at greater risk.

Hunter’s research interests include biomechanics of speech articulators, occupational voice use, biomechanical models of the vocal system, muscle mechanics and muscle models, and signal processing. Broader academic interests include recording techniques, speech perception, musical acoustics and machine recognition of speech.

Dr. Hunter’s 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.

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. He is married and has three children.

Assoc. Dean for Research, College of Communication Arts & Sciences
Director of Trifecta Initiative, College of Nursing, College of Engineering, College of Communication Arts & Sciences

Voice Disorders, Occupational Voice Risks, Biomechanical Modeling, Research Recording Techniques