Paul Forlano
CUNY Brooklyn College, NY·Neuroscience
Hearing is not fixed. The inner ear can be tuned up or down by signals from the brain, and dopamine, a chemical messenger best known for its roles in reward and movement, is one of these signals.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
auditory neuroscience
hearing
inner ear
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test whether sex steroids and melatonin regulate the inner ear's dopamine system by manipulating hormone levels in plainfin midshipman fish and measuring dopamine innervation and receptor gene expression.
- Measure how hormone manipulation changes dopamine synthesis and metabolism (production and breakdown) in the midshipman inner ear.
- Determine whether exposure to male advertisement calls changes local dopamine synthesis in the inner ears of female midshipman fish.
- Measure changes in inner ear dopamine synthesis in females while they respond and attend to social acoustic stimuli, linking dopamine to better detection of social signals.
More about the research
Dopamine-releasing nerve fibers reach the inner ear and are known to become more active after noise damage. Far less is known about what controls them during normal hearing, especially when an animal is listening for social calls. This research asks how hormones and social sounds adjust dopamine in the inner ear to sharpen hearing.
Why it matters
Hearing changes across hormonal cycles, declines with age as hormones drop, and is affected in diseases that lose dopamine neurons, such as Parkinson's. These findings could help explain why some people are more vulnerable or more resilient to hearing loss. They may also offer insight into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and ADHD, conditions in which people have difficulty detecting and orienting to social sounds.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
R. Burger
Lehigh University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether overexpressing BMP7, a signaling protein that patterns the early ear, repatterns the frequency tuning of hair cells in the chick inner ear toward low-frequency types.
Bo Hua Hu
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Neuroscience
Determine how galectin-3, a sugar-binding immune protein, maintains hearing and cochlear structure, using mice in which the Lgals3 gene that encodes it has been disrupted.
Srikanta Mishra
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Examine whether otitis media (OM), common in early childhood, affects the development of spatial listening and of energetic and informational masking after the ear problem resolves, by following children longitudinally.
The school
CUNY Brooklyn College: 1 labs on PI Pages, $15M a year on research.
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