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EVAN MARK
RELKIN
(1951-2002)
Evan M. Relkin, faculty member at the Institute
for Sensory Research at Syracuse University, died
on March 23, 2002 following an unfortunate skating
accident. Evan was a long time member of the
Acoustical Society, publishing in the area of
Physiological Acoustics and serving a term on the
technical committee for Physiological and
Psychological Acoustics. Evan was born October 1,
1951 in New York City. He obtained his
undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. He
continued at the University of Pennsylvania in
Bioengineering and obtained his M.S.E. in 1975. His
doctoral work was also at the University of
Pennsylvania in the Department of Bioengineering,
where, under the direction of his advisor, James
Saunders, Evan traced the development of the
acoustic and mechanical properties of the middle
ear in hamsters. This was important work, as the
research community in physiological acoustics was
attempting to determine the sites and causes of
changes in hearing characteristics that occurred in
the early life of mammals, and Evan's work showed
that an important source of this change was the
middle ear.
Following his PhD. in 1979, Evan spent the next
four years as a Research Associate at the Auditory
Research Laboratory at Northwestern University,
where he worked with Peter Dallas, Jon Siegel,
David Harris and others during those productive and
exciting times at that laboratory. In 1983 he
accepted a faculty position at Syraucse University,
with appointments in the Program in Bioengineering
and also at the Institute for Sensory Research,
where he built his research laboratory. Evan served
as Director of the Program in Bioengineering there
from 1984 until 1986. It was during those years in
the 1980's that he met his wife, Beth Prieve, who
shared with him an interest in auditory function
and also their passion for the outdoors.
At Syracuse, Evan's research was primarily
focused on the electrophysiology of the auditory
nerve. Along with Denis Pelli at the Institute for
Sensory Research, Evan produced a method for
applying signal detection methods to data obtained
from auditory nerve spike recordings. This allowed
him, in the next few years to determine that 1)
that the auditory nerve played only a very small
role in behaviorally observed forward masking, and
2) that low-spontaneous rate neurons had a much
slower recovery time than high-spontaneous rate
auditory neurons. These and other findings were put
to further use with people at Syracuse such as
Jozef Zwislocki, Robert Smith, John Doucet, and
Fan-Gang Zeng.
He is survived by his wife Beth, and their two
children, Lucas and Elena, who reside in
Jamesville, New York, as well as his mother,
Lillian Brookman and brothers Paul and Robert.
Christopher W. Turner
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