Debra L. Tucci has been named director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a division of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She will assume her new duties on September 3, 2019.
Currently, Dr. Tucci is a professor of surgery and director of the cochlear implant program in the Division of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina. She has been a member of the Duke faculty since 1993, when she co-founded the Duke Hearing Center. Her primary research interests focus on addressing barriers to hearing health care for older adults, starting with the primary care setting, and establishing a network of academic and community-based research sites to conduct clinical research in hearing and balance disorders.
“Dr. Tucci’s rich experience melds basic and clinical research in communication disorders with an impressive clinical and surgical practice in otology and neurotology,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “This experience, combined with her leadership roles for numerous scientific and professional organizations, as well as serving previously as an advisor at NIH, makes her ideally suited to lead the NIDCD into the future.”
Dr. Tucci holds a medical doctorate from the University of Virginia.