James L. Flanagan, electrical engineer, died at 89

  Dead Famous

Dead. James Loton Flanagan, born August 26, 1925 and died August 25, 2015 of heart failure.

He was an electrical engineer, and was Rutgers University’s vice president for research until 2004.

He is also director of Rutgers’ Center for Advanced Information Processing and the Board of Governors Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

He was chosen as the 2005 recipient of the Research and Development Council of New Jersey’s Science/Technology Medal.

He worked at Bell Laboratories for 33 years before he joined Rutgers. He has worked in voice communications, computer techniques, and electroacoustic systems.

At Bell Laboratories he was the department head of the Acoustics Research Department for many years, and managed and supported work such as James E. West’s invention of the electret microphone, Bishnu S. Atal’s work on speech coding, David Berkley and Gary Elko’s work on acoustics, Jont Allen and Joe Hall’s work on psychoacoustics, James D. Johnston’s work on perceptual audio coding mp3, work on speech synthesis, and Lawrence Rabiner and Aaron Rosenberg (and others) work on speech recognition.

Flanagan holds the pattent on the modern artificial larynx design.

During his tenure, first as department head, and then Laboratory Director, many advancements in signal processing, psychoacoustics, array microphone processing, digital loudspeakers, and other pioneering achievements were reduced to practice.

Flanagan has been a resident of Warren Township, New Jersey. He died on August 25, 2015 of heart failure.