From Attempting to Save His Father's Hearing to 650,000 Ears Worldwide

The motivation was personal before it became scientific: the father of Australian physician Graham Clark suffered from severe hearing loss, and his son spent decades pursuing a single question: could an electrical device restore speech to a deaf ear?

The Japanese Honda Foundation announced that its 2026 prize would be shared equally between Clark, a professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne, and Austrian engineer Ingeborg Hochmair, co-founder of the company MED-EL. According to a statement from the foundation, the honor recognizes their independent work on the multi-channel cochlear implant, which enabled users to distinguish sounds and understand language.

The two paths ran in parallel: Hochmair, her husband Erwin, and Professor Kurt Burián performed a successful implantation in Vienna in 1977, while Clark’s team carried out the first multi-channel implant surgery at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne in 1978, followed by the first pediatric procedure in 1985. Today, more than 650,000 people worldwide use the technology.

Clark said, according to a University of Melbourne statement, that the award is “a great honor because it highlights the importance of harnessing technology for human well-being.”

The prize is worth 10 million Japanese yen and will be presented in Tokyo on November 16.