He then went on to conduct research in nanoengineering at Argonne National Laboratory. Jian Zhou worked closely with Miles during this research as a doctoral student he graduated in 2018. One - spiders - listen in a distinctly unique way, using the webs they spin in addition to the small hairs on their bodies that sense motion. Other animals, though, are easier to manage. “They were just biting everybody - it was awful. All over the first floor of the Engineering and Science Building! It was like being up in the Nature Preserve in July,” he said. Unfortunately, sometimes working with animals can be a bit of a hurdle - like the time Miles’ collaborators at Cornell University brought some female mosquitos to Binghamton for research. However, there are other ways to “hear,” and many animals to mimic.

Microphones work by taking a sound wave and turning it into an electrical signal most are modeled after the human ear and its ability to sense pressure. This essential difference is what makes biomimicry such an interesting perspective to pursue. “Things like mosquitoes and crickets and midges - they hear using little hairs, and those hairs are driven by motion in the air that’s part of the sound field.” Tiny changes in the atmospheric pressure cause our eardrums to move, and then our ears detect that motion,” Miles said. Our ears have little drums, little surfaces, or tympana, membranes that are driven by changes in pressure. Yet to understand why this patent is a revolutionary advancement in technology, one has to understand: How do microphones work? And, what really is sound? Using biomimicry as a model, Miles worked with then-doctoral student Jian Zhou on his thesis project the pair would go on to pioneer and patent the bio-inspired flow microphone - the very patent that has now been commercialized by the Canadian venture firm TandemLaunch and its spin-off company Soundskrit, which has also recently released both an analog and digital version of Miles’ original concept. His research is wide-ranging with various applications, from consumer electronics and lab instrumentation to healthcare applications, but his field of interest lies primarily in acoustics. In his distinguished career, he also served for NASA, Boeing and his alma mater, UC Berkeley he holds numerous patents and published scholarship and has received many awards, including the University Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Research Foundation’s Outstanding Inventor Award. He has been with Binghamton University since 1989 in a variety of roles. Miles received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and his master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington.

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