David Thomas Kemp, FRS (born 24 February 1945) is a British physicist who is a professor working at the

UCL Ear Institute The UCL Ear Institute is an academic department of the Faculty of Brain Sciences of University College London (UCL) located in Gray's Inn Road in the Bloomsbury district of Central London, England, next to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear H ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

. He was educated at King's College London (BSc, 1966; AKC; PhD, 1970). He discovered the phenomenon of

otoacoustic emission An otoacoustic emission (OAE) is a sound that is generated from within the inner ear. Having been predicted by Austrian astrophysicist Thomas Gold in 1948, its existence was first demonstrated experimentally by British physicist David Kemp in 197 ...

in July 1978 while working at the

Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital The Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital (the RNTNEH) was a health facility on Gray's Inn Road in London. It closed in October 2019 when services transferred to the new Royal National ENT and Eastman Dental Hospitals on Huntley Street, L ...

. He founded a company that makes equipment to test for hearing defects by detecting otacoustic emission, which is absent in the ears of people suffering deafness caused by neural impairment. Because the method does not require any cooperation from the subject, it is valuable for detecting deafness in babies. He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemat ...

in 2004.

References

External links

UCL News
1945 births Living people Academics of University College London Alumni of King's College London Associates of King's College Fellows of the Royal Society {{UK-med-bio-stub