Legacy
What outlives the appointment
Twenty doctorates, a broadcast network, and trials that kept reporting long after the chair was vacated.
The doctoral school
At least twenty doctorates were completed under his supervision, verified against institutional records. The topics map onto the research programmes almost one to one — each trial platform was also somebody’s thesis. That is the reason for 107 last-author papers and only ten as first author: after 2009 the work belonged to the candidates.
| Year | Candidate | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | H. C. Stronks | Electrical and acoustic responses of the cochlea |
| 2012 | M. C. J. Aarts | Evidence and its use in otorhinolaryngology |
| 2013 | D. M. A. Kamalski | Laser effects in stapes surgery |
| 2014 | M. E. F. Niesten | Superior canal dehiscence |
| 2016 | Y. E. Smulders | Bilateral simultaneous cochlear implantation |
| 2019 | S. L. van Egmond | Advanced imaging, including 7 Tesla inner-ear MRI |
Teaching at a distance
Founding member and President of LION, the Live International Otolaryngology Network, which broadcasts operations from theatre to surgeons who would otherwise never see the case — free to the viewer. Global Telemedicine Studios in Utrecht, running since 2006, is the technical backbone for those broadcasts.
Surgical education has an access problem that journals do not solve: reading how an operation is done is not watching it done. The broadcasts were built for that gap.
Still reporting
A trial programme has a long tail. These landed years after the Utrecht chair ended — run to completion by the people who inherited them.
2025
Speech in noise, single-sided deafness
The randomised trial’s speech-in-noise outcomes, published in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.
2024–25
Day-case cost analyses
The cost sub-analyses of both day-case trials — cochlear implantation and stapes surgery — reported in full, including the null result.
2024
Localisation and tinnitus
Sound localisation and tinnitus outcomes from the same single-sided-deafness randomisation, in Trends in Hearing and Frontiers in Neurology.
What carried
- Into guidelines
- WHO safe-listening standard, ITU 2024 guidance, AAO-HNS patient resources
- Into reimbursement
- Dutch Health Care Insurance Board reports on paediatric bilateral implantation
- Into practice
- A published recommendation against thulium laser stapedotomy, from the group’s own measurements
- Into the literature
- 49 systematic reviews, several of which are still the standing synthesis in their niche
- Into people
- Twenty-plus doctors who now run their own programmes