Bekesy, Georg von

Bekesy, Georg von (gā`ôrk fən bĕk`ĭshē), 1899–1972, American biophysicist, b. Budapest, Hungary, grad. Univ. of Budapest (Ph.D. 1923). He was (1923–46) a physicist in the research laboratory of the Hungarian telephone system and also taught (1932–46) at the Univ. of Budapest. From 1947 to 1949 he was a research professor at the Caroline Institute, Stockholm. In 1949 he became senior research fellow in the psychoacoustic laboratory at Harvard. He was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the physical mechanism of stimulation within the cochlea, a snail-shaped cavity of the inner ear.