Robert Jackler (’79) ALUMNI STORIES

“There’s a difference, in personal relationships, between falling in love and being in love,” says Robert

Jackler,

MD, the Sewall

Professor of Otolaryngology—Head &

Neck Surgery and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. “The first being easier than the second.”

He’s not talking about people but reminiscing about his decades-long relationship with the field of otolaryngology. When the surgeon was deciding on an area of study, he wanted to pick a specialty that other surgeons not only fell in love with, but also stayed in love with.

Decades later, he’s still in love with the field.

“I got really very fascinated by the fact that otolaryngology had to do with human communication—hearing and voice,” Jackler explains. “And, when you think about it, what is more essential to the nature of being human?”

Jackler received his medical degree from Boston University in 1979. However, his experience in medicine goes back to childhood, when he would accompany his cardiologist father on hospital rounds. A World War II veteran and Chobanian & Avedisian graduate, Jackler’s father brought him to various hospitals in his hometown of Waterville, Maine. “The nurses would absolutely dote on me,” Jackler recalls.

His father died in his 30s, when the future surgeon was only 9 years old. Despite the financial and personal struggles his family endured after this tragic loss, Jackler says that his father’s legacy was a guiding light in his career. “It was an inspiration, in a way, where his life and career were cut so short that I always felt sort of motivated to complete what he was never able to do,” he says.

In his fourth year of medical school, the New England native spent a month in San Francisco, which ultimately led him to rank the University of California, San Francisco as his first choice for residency.

Jackler has remained in California ever since, specializing in complex ear diseases including tumors of the lateral and posterior cranial base. He compares the technical also initiated the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss, an interdisciplinary research program seeking to overcome hearing loss through regenerative means. Jackler says there has been significant progress towards the program’s goal of “making the currently untreatable cochlear hearing loss—the most prevalent form of hearing loss—curable.” difficulty of auditory surgery—with its small, delicate tools and complex procedures—to watchmaking. His technical innovations, which he illustrated in a series of microsurgical atlases, have focused on creating means of accessing difficult-to-reach intracranial tumors.

His research extends outside the field of otolaryngology; in 2006, he and his wife Laurie founded the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising research group. He became interested in tobacco advertising after his mother, a lifelong smoker, developed lung cancer. Jackler says that as a child he would steal her cigarettes— not to use them, but to throw them away.

“I became curious how the cultural acceptance of shredded leaf wrapped in paper became…associated with all aspects of life, work and play,” he says. “I was intrigued by the genius of tobacco marketers in making cigarettes hugely popular.” When he started investigating tobacco advertising, he was surprised to find little previous scholarship on the topic.

Jackler relishes the long-term relationships he has built with patients through otolaryngology. “I enjoy taking care of patients who I’ve known for a long time,” he says. “I’ve had patients who I operated on when they were infants, and I now take care of them and their children decades later.”

For 18 years, Jackler chaired Stanford’s Otolaryngology department, growing the program from just six faculty members to 55. He

Since 2006, Jackler has amassed a research collection of more than 60,000 tobacco advertisements, which are now housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and viewable through his Stanford research website.

His group’s current research focus is on emerging nicotine products such as e-cigarette brands like JUUL, with the goal of informing policymakers on ways to educate the youth targeted by these brands.

“I am often asked why an ear surgeon would choose to become an expert in tobacco advertising. What motivated me was that there is only one leading preventable cause of disease and death—tobacco use— and I felt if I could help reign in the tobacco industry’s promotion of its deadly products, it could make a real difference.” ●