I am interested in sensory neurobiology with a primary focus on comparative studies of the auditory systems of vertebrates. Research in the Auditory Neurobiology Laboratory involves study of the fish auditory system from the receptor organs to the CNS at the cellular, systems, and organismal levels using anatomical, neurophysiological, and behavioral approaches. My current research has two directions. One concerns the neural basis of sound localization by fish. Sound localization is a very important function for the auditory systems of all vertebrates.
Most terrestrial vertebrates localize a sound source by comparing information encoded by two ears.
However, binaural cues such as interaural time and intensity differences are most unlikely available to fish because of the higher speed of sound traveling in water and the relatively small distance between the two ears. Auditory receptor cells, hair cells, in the fish ear are spatially oriented in various directions in three dimensional space. It was hypothesized that fish encode acoustic directional information about a sound source using arrays of these spatially oriented hair cells. To test this hypothesis, I am currently conducting experiments to record neural responses from auditory ganglion cells which innervate sensory hair cells in the fish ear. After the response directionality of each ganglion cell is characterized, a neuronal tracer is intracellularly injected into the ganglion cell.