COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Neurobiology of Hearing provides an introduction to the auditory system and current research in auditory neuroscience. This field is a microcosm of neuroscience, in general, and the interdisciplinary approach embodied by neuroscience. Students will develop a detailed understanding of the peripheral and central auditory system and the neurobiological basis of sound processing. The course is taught by a faculty drawn from UConn at UConn Health and Storrs, the Institute for Neuroscience at University of Salamanca, and Johns Hopkins Medical School plus guest lectures who in past years have come from the MRC Institute of Hearing, University of Leicester, and University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom and the University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, and Duke University in the USA. The diverse areas of expertise of the faculty guarantees that the students will be exposed to different aspects of auditory research and neuroscience including synaptic physiology, neural circuitry, acoustics, auditory physiology, and behavior. The diversity also guarantees that the student will not be bored by a single professor. Students will be assessed on their classroom participation, papers, and critiques of papers. Students will receive grades based on exams and papers in which they propose a hypothesis-driven experiment directly related to previous lectures in the course. Students also will be graded on their critiques of papers by other students. There will be student presentations of research proposals the final week.
The course also includes a short course in Neuroscience Methods. This requires a trip to Prague in the Czech Republic to the Institute for Experimental Medicine at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague where there is a large group of scientists that also study the neurobiology of hearing.
https://health.uconn.edu/meds5377/
Associate Professor
Dept. of Otolaryngology-HNS
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
443-287-4229