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Nanette Shaw
CUNY Graduate Center Assistive Technology Pioneer to Receive Mayor's AwardHarry Levitt, Distinguished Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, has been named one of four recipients of the1999 Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology. Levitt, a leading researcher and inventor in the field of hearing aids and assistive technologies, is the co-recipient in the category of Technology. The award was presented by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in a ceremony at Gracie Mansion on Wednesday, March 10. City College Professor Andreas Acrivos, who also serves on the CUNY Graduate Center doctoral faculty, received the Mayor's Award in the Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences category. The other Technology recipient was Dr. John Niblack of Pfizer, Inc. The award in the third category, Biomedical Sciences, went to Dr. Paul Greengard of The Rockefeller University. The recipients in all three categories were chosen by panelists from the New York Academy of Sciences, which administers the awards. Professor Levitt is a renowned pioneer in the creation of devices and systems to help people with hearing loss. He created a model for the world's first digital hearing aid and has developed advanced methods for filtering out background noise in audio perception technology. He recently developed a communication system in which speech is converted to Braille or other tactile codes so that a hearing person can communicate effectively with a deaf-blind person. Professor Levitt also introduced computerized adaptive testing to the field of audiology. These techniques are now widely used in the fields of speech and hearing, experimental psychology, and other related disciplines. Professor Levitt has been on the Graduate Center faculty since 1969; prior to that, he was a researcher at Bell Labs. Among his numerous awards and distinctions, he was a winner of Johns Hopkins University's First National Search for Applications of Personal Computing to Aid the Handicapped (1981), he was selected for the National Institute of Health's Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award (1988), and he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics, and Biomechanics since 1974. Professor Levitt has also contributed scores of articles, chapters, and research papers to the literature in his field. He holds a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Witwatersrand and a doctorate, also in electrical engineering, from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Professor Andreas Acrivos, is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts in the field of fluid dynamics. He has made indispensable contributions to the modern theory of fluid mechanics and heat and mass transfer as they apply to a wide variety of physical and chemical processes. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Professor Acrivos has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the California Institute of Technology. He is currently Director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics at The City College, CUNY. Professor Acrivos holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Syracuse University and a master's and doctorate from the University of Minnesota. The Graduate School and University Center (GSUC) is the doctorate-granting institution of the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, GSUC draws its faculty of more than 1,700 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, GSUC has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. GSUC also houses 23 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate School's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. |