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Sterba Hearing Research Professor and Vice Chair - Department of Otolaryngology
Director – The Molecular Otolaryngology and Renal Research Laboratories
Director – Iowa Institute of Human Genetics
Professor of Otolaryngology, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Pediatrics and Internal Medicine (Division of Nephrology)
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa, United States
Dr Richard Smith is Sterba Hearing Research Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery at the University of Iowa, where he also directs the Iowa Institute of Human Genetics and the Molecular Otolaryngology and Renal Research Laboratories. The Molecular Otolaryngology and Renal Research Laboratories an internationally recognized center of expertise in genetic hearing loss and ultra-rare complement-mediated renal diseases. It has Clinical Diagnostics and Basic Research Divisions. The Clinical Diagnostics Division is staffed by 22 research assistants and is CLIA certified and Joint Commission accredited. The Basic Research Division includes graduate and post-graduate students and senior research scientists, who collectively have made many significant contributions to our understanding of the biology of hearing. As a metric of their contributions to hearing research, they have mapped about 20% of all known non-syndromic hearing loss loci and cloned 22% of all genes implicated in deafness. MORL scientists have also made significant contributions to novel forms of hearing habilitation, focusing on the use of RNA interference to rescue non-syndromic hearing loss through mutation agnostic strategies. As a reflection of his contributions to science, Smith has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians.