Research Labs

Sensory transduction in the inner ear is mediated by mechanoreceptive hair cells. Unfortunately, hair cells can be injured or lost after exposure to noise, ototoxic drugs, or as part of normal aging. Such injury typically results in permanent hearing loss and/or disequilibrium. Our research focuses on the biological mechanisms that regulate the production of hair cells and the survival and growth of their afferent neurons.

Our laboratory's goals are to understand how specific pathological changes occur in hair cells exposed to noise by defining the dynamic cellular processes that lead to hair-cell synapse loss and hair-cell death. We investigate these questions using zebrafish as a model for human hearing and deafness.

The goal of our research is to study the role of the vestibulo-cerebellum in motor control, balance and spatial navigation. Currently, our lab is testing the hypothesis that the floccular lobe computes a forward model (predictive model) of the eye movement from vestibular and efferent copy information, and that the posterior vermis computes an estimate of our heading (translation) and orientation in space from semicircular canals and otolith information. Our experimental techniques include single unit recordings, pharmacology, behavioral neuroscience, mouse neurogenetics, histochemistry and computational modeling.