Mcginley Lab
Principal Investigator: Matthew J Mcginley
Institution: Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Detecting where sounds are coming from in the environment relies on acoustic cues generated as sounds interact with the body. A cornerstone of auditory neuroscience has been to understand how auditory brainstem circuits process these cues to localize sounds. But this work has largely been done in static experimental conditions. During natural behavior, the body is in constant motion. A prime example is the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), the main brainstem circuit for localizing sounds in the vertical plane. The DCN plastically integrate multimodal inputs related to head and ear movements, and neuromodulatory inputs reflecting brain states, with acoustic signals from the auditory nerve. Yet little is known about how these multimodal and modulatory inputs impact DCN spatial computations during active behavior. This knowledge gap contains important untapped potential, for example to incorporate body kinematic data into cochlear implants or hearing aids, improving their performance in natural listening conditions, and limits our ability to understand the causes and consequences of DCN circuit pathology, such as in tinnitus and hyperacusis. This project tests the hypothesis that the DCN…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01DC023005-01A1: State dependence of spatial computations in dorsal cochlear nucleus cell types (2026)
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