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Dr. Michael R. Stinson has been working in the acoustics field for 35 years, starting with his appointment as a Research Officer at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada. His research activities span a broad range of technical activities. For many years he studied the acoustics of the human ear canal and modelling of the middle ear, in support of hearing aid design and high-frequency audiometry. He developed the "modified horn equation" approach to describe mathematically the sound fields in human ear canals with high accuracy. He has investigated sound propagation in porous materials, for noise control applications, both theoretically, through development of new models that predict the attenuation of sound, and experimentally, through construction of model porous material having round, triangular and square pores. Dr. Stinson has investigated sound propagation outdoors, to understand the importance and effect of barriers, ground absorption, turbulence in the atmosphere, refraction, and surface topology. He developed novel meteorological instrumentation and handled the numerical simulations for the NRC research team. He has also studied the use of arrays of microphones, for videoconference and surveillance applications. A procedure was found that made use of the shape of the structure on which microphones were mounted to enhance the ability to listen in a desired direction.

Throughout his career, Mike has given service to several acoustical organizations. In 1981, he was a member of the team that organized the Spring 1981 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). He was a member of the Technical Program committee for the 12th International Congress on Acoustics (ICA) held in Toronto in 1986. He was Co-Chair of the Technical Program and Co-Editor of the Proceedings for the 1992 INTER-NOISE meeting in Toronto. He was Technical Program Chair for the 1993 ASA meeting in Ottawa. And he was Co-Chairman of the Technical Program and Co-Editor of the Proceedings for the 1994 Int. Symposium on Long Range Sound Propagation, in Ottawa. Mike served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America from 1997 to 2002. He has been an Associate Editor for JASA Express Letters, from 1999 to the present. He was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on Noise (2003 - 2006), a Member of the ASA Executive Council (2007 - 2010), its Vice President (2011 - 2014), and has recently been elected to serve as ASA President. Mike has been a Member of the Board of the ICA (2007 - 2013) and its Secretary General since 2013.

Of particular note, Mike Stinson was the General Chair for the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, held in Montréal, Canada, 2-7 June 2013.

Dr. Stinson has been a Fellow of the ASA, since 1990; a Distinguished Corresponding Member of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering, since 1993; an Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo (1997-2008); and a Visiting Associate Research Scientist in Otolaryngology, Columbia University (1986-1994). In 2009, he was the recipient of the ASA Silver Medal in Noise.

Following his retirement from the NRC in June 2009, Dr. Stinson was honoured with the appointment as Researcher Emeritus with the NRC Institute of Microstructural Sciences.