The Gabriel Tucker Professorship of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery II

This Professorship was established in 2020, when the value of the endowment of the Gabriel Tucker Professorship of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery had increased sufficiently to support a second professorship. In l949 an anonymous donor created the original endowment fund for Gabriel F. Tucker Sr., MD, who at the time was Professor and Chair of the Department of Bronchology, Esophagology, and Laryngeal Surgery in the University’s Graduate School of Medicine. During his lifetime, the income from the fund was used for research and training at his discretion. Upon his death, the conditions of the donor’s agreement provided for the establishment of the Gabriel Tucker Professorship.

Gabriel F. Tucker Sr. (1880–1958) was known worldwide, particularly for the invention of many new instruments for foreign body removal and for examination and treatment of the larynx, lung, and esophagus. He shared this talent with his sons, John A. Tucker, MD (1930–2016) and Gabriel F. Tucker Jr., MD (1924–1986), who also became prominent laryngologists. Dr. John Tucker was a Penn alumnus who headed pediatric and adult laryngology programs at many Philadelphia hospitals and served as an adjunct professor of head and neck surgery from 2008 to 2011 at the Perelman School of Medicine.

Current Chairholder

Yale Cohen, PhD

Dr. Yale Cohen, PhD is the Gabriel Tucker Professor II in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He has secondary appointments in neuroscience and bioengineering. While at Penn, he has served as the Institutional Animal Care and Use (IACUC) Chair and Director of the Office of Animal Welfare. Currently, he is the Graduate Group Chair of Bioengineering and the Assistant Dean of Research Facilities and Resources in the Perelman School of Medicine.

Dr. Cohen’s research examines how the brain combines sensory, motor, and cognitive cues to form internal computational models of the external world. His work has been funded by the NIH, ARL (Army Research Laboratory), and (Office of Naval Research) as well as private foundations. He is the founding Principal Investigator (PI) on a T32 grant that supports pre-doctoral students who combine experimental and theoretical techniques to understand audition and language.

Dr. Cohen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He continued his research as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology. He began his faculty career at Dartmouth and arrived at Penn in 2009 as Director of the Hearing Sciences Center.