Ron Eavey, MD, Guy M. Maness Professor and chair of Otolaryngology and director of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center, far right, testified recently at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., along with members of Ear Community.

A 2011 cicada swarm is leading to transinstitutional research at the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to develop a surgical planning tool to help restore speech for people with vocal fold paralysis.

Renowned neurotologist Michael E. Glasscock III, MD, adjunct professor of Otolaryngology, died Feb. 17 in the home he shared with his daughter, Martina Glasscock Barnes, in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 84. The cause of death was kidney disease.

Yu Shyr, Ph.D., Harold L. Moses Professor of Cancer Research and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Quantitative Sciences, has been named chair of Vanderbilt’s Department of Biostatistics. He will assume the post Sept. 1.

Having a child born without an external ear or ear canal can be a scary and confusing experience for parents, and finding medical care for the rare condition has meant having to travel to several distant medical centers for treatment options.

Ron Eavey, M.D., Guy M. Maness Professor and chair of Otolaryngology and director of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center, received the 2017 Edward C. Bradley S.J., M.D., Medical Alumni Award from the Saint Joseph’s University Medical Alumni Chapter at its annual awards event on its Philadelphia campus on April 23.

Last fall, the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center became the second facility in the country and third in the world to use a fully endoscopic surgical technique to remove an acoustic neuroma, a rare benign tumor on the balance and hearing nerves.