Gunnar Quass
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Neuroscience
Cochlear implants (CIs), devices that stimulate the hearing nerve electrically, let over a million people hear, but results vary enormously. Some users barely communicate while others hear almost normally, and doctors lack reliable ways to predict who will do well.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
cochlear implants
hearing loss
deafness
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Record high-density activity of auditory cortex neurons in deafened mice over weeks as they learn a reward-based cochlear implant task, testing whether synchronized stimulation disrupts formation of small neuron networks.
- Test whether cortical oscillations measured by EEG predict how well and how quickly mice learn to use cochlear implant stimulation, as an objective marker of outcome.
- Relate correlated variability and network activity in auditory cortex to behavioral performance and learning speed to identify candidate mechanisms behind cochlear implant success.
More about the research
Clinical results suggest the brain's ability to adapt and learn, called plasticity, plays a major role, yet the neural changes caused by long-term implant use remain largely unknown.
Why it matters
Many cochlear implant users struggle to understand speech, and hearing loss is expected to affect about 700 million people worldwide by 2050. Finding brain activity patterns that track implant success could lead to objective outcome predictors, plasticity-based therapies and implant stimulation strategies that better support how the brain learns to hear.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Matthew Richardson
University of California-Irvine, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether selective intraneural stimulation of apical (low-frequency) auditory nerve fibers improves cats' behavioral discrimination of temporal pitch compared with a conventional cochlear implant electrode, alongside eFFR scalp recordings.
Maria Geffen
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Train mice by operant conditioning to detect or discriminate target sounds in background noise, and vary noise contrast before each target to test how adaptation to the background interacts with target detection.
Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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