BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ, June 27, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Michael H. L. Hecker a Lifetime Achiever. Mr. Hecker celebrates many years of experience in his professional work, and has been noted for the expertise, accomplishments, and credentials he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, profiled individuals are selected on the basis of current reference value. Many factors are taken into account during the selection process.
With over 50 years of experience in the fields of electrical engineering, speech research, and forensic acoustics, Mr. Hecker is a preeminent expert in the science of speech. Notably, he was one of the technical examiners of the presidential tapes during the Watergate investigation. He had developed procedures for identifying recorded voices and authenticating magnetic tapes for legal purposes. As an independent consultant, Mr. Hecker served as an expert witness in many legal cases. After a lifetime of working as a scientist, he can now explore his aesthetic interests as a screenwriter and a producer of short films submitted to film festivals.
Mr. Hecker was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936. His parents were Hanns E. Hecker and Wilhelmine Corinth. He immigrated to the United States in 1948 and was naturalized in 1953. Mr. Hecker studied electrical engineering at Northeastern University and participated in their ROTC program. He earned his BS degree with honors in 1959. He continued his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a MS degree in electrical engineering in 1961. To fulfill his military obligation, he worked two years at the U.S. Army Electronics Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. As Project Officer in the Voice Security Branch, he was responsible for evaluating prototype security equipment provided by contractors. He was promoted to First Lieutenant, U.S. Army Signal Corps, in 1964.
After his military service, Mr. Hecker worked as a Senior Research Engineer in the Sensory Sciences Research Center of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a contract from the U.S. Air Force to measure the effects of task-induced stress on the voices of pilots during simulated flights. Similar projects on the effects of various diseases on speech production followed. When the director of the Center accepted an offer to transfer to SRI International in Menlo Park, California, Mr. Hecker decided to go with him. They joined a much larger research group and continued to work on contracts involving a wide range of speech and hearing problems.
Mr. Hecker received a scholarship from SRI International and the Stanford University School of Medicine. He attended all lectures and laboratory sessions while working half-time at SRI International. For his dissertation, he developed a novel signal-processing algorithm that improves speech intelligibility in a noisy environment. He received his PhD degree in speech and hearing sciences in 1974. Shortly after his graduation, the attorney for President Nixon hired him to examine the Watergate tapes. Mr. Hecker also worked several years as a Senior Behavioral Scientist in the Department of Behavioral Medicine of SRI International. He identified speech behaviors that predicted coronary heart disease in a prospective epidemiological study.
Mr. Hecker was a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and a member of the American Psychological Association. He served as Principal Scientific Consultant to a physician who edited and published a collection of scientific papers on the topic of speech evaluation in medicine and psychiatry (1981). He was the author of "Speaker Recognition: An Interpretive Survey of the Literature" (1971). He also authored 25 scientific papers that were published in professional journals and medical books. Mr. Hecker was included in numerous volumes of Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in the World.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Mr. Hecker has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website at wwlifetimeachievement.com/2017/04/28/michael-hecker/
About Marquis Who's Who:
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the first edition of Who's Who in America , Marquis Who's Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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