R. Burger
Lehigh University, PA·Neuroscience
How does the brain learn to organize sound by pitch? In both the inner ear and the brain's hearing centers, cells are laid out in an orderly map from low to high frequency, an arrangement called tonotopy.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
auditory development
tonotopy
tonotopic map
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Measure the electrical input responses of cochlear nucleus neurons, the first brain cells to receive auditory nerve signals, in chicks that developed with frequency-altered inner ears.
- Determine whether the structure of the cochlear nucleus depends on normal, frequency-ordered innervation from the auditory nerve, using chick embryos with BMP7-altered ears.
More about the research
A long-open question is whether the ear's layout instructs the brain to build its matching map, or whether the brain builds it from its own local cues. Answering this has been hard because the ear's input could not be changed without destroying the ear or causing hearing loss.
Why it matters
Children born with early hearing loss or an underdeveloped cochlea (cochlear hypoplasia) depend on brain circuits that may not form normally without proper input from the ear. Learning how the inner ear shapes the developing auditory brain could help guide the design and timing of treatments for early deafness, with the aim of preserving normal structure and function in the brain's hearing circuits.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Guy Perkins
University of Arizona, AZ·Neuroscience
Image aging spiral ganglion neurons and their connections from inner-ear hair cells to the cochlear nucleus with serial block-face electron microscopy (SBEM), looking for loss of myelin and synapses.
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.
Paul Forlano
CUNY Brooklyn College, NY·Neuroscience
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.
The school
Lehigh University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $62M a year on research, 99 research doctorates a year.
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