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| Samuel P. Parmly Jr.(1871-1938) |
Samuel P. Parmly Jr. (1871-1938) was a Chicago businessman and lawyer who suffered from a form of partial deafness and he established the Parmly Trust in 1942. The trust was to be used at a university in Illinois to fund a research department devoted to gaining knowledge about the "causes, cure and relief of human deafness" and provide "scientific aid to and education of the deaf and partially deaf." The Parmly Research Foundation was formed at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1942 to "solve problems of hearing through research," and began to study hearing as a biophysics problem. Peter J. Mills (1899-1970) was appointed director of the Foundation and Associate Professor of Physics at IIT. By 1959, Parmly was engaged in three aspects of research: Physics (EEG instrumentation), Psychology (psychic factors in deafness), and Physiology (EEG as an objective measure of hearing). In 1959, the scientific personnel at Parmly formed a non-profit corporation called, for the first time, the Parmly Hearing Institute (PHI). In June, 1960, the Parmly Trust was terminated at IIT because the focus of funded research had shifted from physics to psychology. The PHI moved to temporary quarters at the Lakeshore Campus of Loyola University of Chicago. The stated goal of the PHI at this time was to study and help alleviate all forms of deafness. In 1961, Parmly was formally established at Loyola, and Dr. Derbyshire was appointed Director with Mills remaining on the staff until retirement in 1967. The PHI was located in a brick building on Sheridan Rd. where Mertz and Centennial Halls now stand. Dr. Derbyshire resigned in 1963 and Dr. Mills again became Director. In 1967, Parmly moved into Damen Hall on the Lake Shore Campus of Loyola University. With Mills' retirement, Dr. Horacio Rimoldi, director of the Psychometric Laboratory of the Psychology Department, became director of Parmly until 1969. Little hearing research occurred at PHI during this time. In 1970, Dr. Terrence Dolan became the first director to be hired from outside the University, and set up the present sound room and the first digital computer system at Parmly to study binaural processing and the effects of intense sound on the ear. In 1977, Dr. William Yost became acting director while Dr. Dolan spent a year on a von Humboldt fellowship in Germany. Dolan took a job as the Director of the Waisman Center for Mental Retardation at the University of Wisconsin and Bill Yost became director of the PHI in 1978. Under Dr. Yost, the PHI began an vigorous program to increase extra-mural funding and the focus of research expanded to include human and animal psychoacoustics, single-cell neurophysiology in a variety of vertebrate species, anatomy of the auditory organs and brain, and mathematical modeling of the hearing process.
Richard Fay is the present director of the PHI. Parmly continues to conduct research on a broad range of topics in basic hearing science and continues to be supported by individual research grants from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.
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| Peter J. Mills Director: (1943-1966) |
Terrence Dolan Director: (1969-1977) |
William A. Yost Director: (1977-2001) |
Richard R. Fay Director: (2001-present) |