By Dave Scheiber
On stage clutching a mic, swaying to the band, Dr. Yael Bensoussan could easily pass for a professional pop singer. In fact, that was precisely her career path earlier in life when she toured as a singer-songwriter and recording artist. But then came a bump in the road in the form of a bump on her vocal cords -- a nodule that made it impossible to belt out tunes as she once did.
Prior to becoming a physician, Dr. Yael Bensoussan was a professional singer
Dr. Yael Bensoussan's professional album cover
Not to be deterred, she visited a laryngologist who referred her to a speech pathologist, and in time, she rehabilitated her voice enough to continue with singing. Influenced by the medical care she received, Bensoussan boldly traded that dream for a new one: Becoming a laryngologist to help people dealing with a variety of vocal cord issues. And today, you can find her doing that as founder and director of the inaugural USF Health Voice Center, forever appreciative of the help she received to regain her own voice.
“I was extremely grateful, and I also understand how these people working together helped me,” she said. “My dream was to have a multi-disciplinary voice center, and here I am. When I started here, there was no voice center, and it’s been an incredible journey to build a team here that’s very passionate.”
One of the amazing initiatives Bensoussan and her colleagues undertake in the lab is creating a multi-institutional, ethically sourced database of voices of people with a variety of disorders to fuel voice research. The National Institutes of Health-funded Voice as a Biomarker of Health project allows them to look at different biomarkers in a voice to provide insight into whether an individual may have a disease. All of that work is aided by artificial intelligence.
“AI is really revolutionizing the field because of the way we can analyze things faster,” she said. “We are becoming a hub for these kinds of innovations and that’s the beauty of academia. It’s striving for better and looking for new innovations, asking ourselves how can we help our patients get better? And the support I get from this university – the support my team and my lab gets – is incredible.”
What does “being bold” mean to Bensoussan? “Being bold means to use the human voice to diagnose and treat diseases. To have crazy ideas and follow through with them.”