Helen Carr Peake
1931-2002
Helen Carr Peake grew up in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, not far from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was graduated from the Morse School in 1944 and Cambridge High and Latin School in 1948. She enjoyed academic challenges, especially in mathematics, but was not able to study advanced mathematics in high school because it was not open to female students.
In 1951, Ms. Peake was graduated from the School of Nursing of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Roxbury. In 1952, she married William T. Peake, a graduate student at MIT. She attended Simmons College for one year before moving to Dayton, Ohio, where she completed the BS degree in Biology in 1955 at the University of Dayton, Ohio.
After returning to the Boston area in 1956, Ms. Peake continued her education through Harvard and MIT extension courses. In 1990, as a special student, she took freshman calculus at MIT—and passed, to her great satisfaction. Other serious pursuits included child raising, genealogy, the stock market, and computational data-processing. Her husband became a distinguished member of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory (EPL), and MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) faculty.
As part of these research and academic communities, Ms. Peake sought interactions with students, learned about their backgrounds, celebrated their accomplishments, and helped them deal with problems. These connections with MIT enriched both her life, and the many individuals who met her and were graced by her kindness and attentive support.
Bill Peake was a professor in EECS and a principal investigator in RLE from 1960 (when he completed is doctoral studies) to 2014 (when he retired). He is best known for his research in auditory physiology, including measurements and models of sound-induced motions of middle and inner ear structures — focusing on signal transmission and coding in the auditory system.
Much of Professor Peake’s experimental work was done at the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. This laboratory had been created to bring together researchers interested in scientific and clinical studies of hearing. Professor Peake was a founding member of the Speech and Hearing program in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program, which is currently offered by Harvard Medical School as the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Tehnology (SHBT) program.