Carey D. Balaban, PhD

Professor, Dept. of Otolaryngology
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

Dr. Balaban earned his bachelor’s degree in History at Michigan State University and his PhD in Anatomy from the University of Chicago.

After postdoctoral training at the University of Tokyo, Dr. Balaban served as an Assistant Professor in Medicine at the Pennsylvania State University, before he joined the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor in the School of Medicine in 1988. He was promoted to associate professor in 1993 and to full professor in 2000, and also served a three-year term as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs.

Dr. Balaban has extensive experience in conducting multidisciplinary, cross-cutting research in biomedical sciences, engineering and social sciences, and has participated in the emerging fields of augmented cognition and neural engineering. His overriding interest has been formulation of mathematical models, heuristic models, and teleological approaches to interpret data from basic science experiments in terms of behavioral and clinical phenomena. His recent work is extending the implications of these models to analogous features of mild-traumatic brain injury, acoustic trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, including work in the nascent field of mass spectrometric histological imaging. He has also participated in developing patented technologies to gauge situational awareness and cognitive engagement from postural orienting responses and decision support software for responses to mass casualty events. In addition to more than 190 peer-reviewed basic research and scholarly articles and two issued patents, Dr. Balaban is an author of two books on 17th century medicine and co-editor of a book on neurosensory aspects of mild-traumatic brain injury.