Paul Albert Fuchs, PhD

Paul Albert Fuchs, Ph.D., joined the Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery department at Johns Hopkins in 1995, after a decade on the Physiology faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  Originally from Fenton, Missouri, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Biology from Reed College, obtained his doctorate in Neurobiology at Stanford University (with Peter Getting and Don Kennedy) then did postdoctoral research there (with John Nicholls) and at Cambridge University (with Robert Fettiplace).  While in Cambridge, Dr. Fuchs met his wife Johanna Marvan.  They have two sons, Toby and Sam (m. Andrea) and grandchildren, Eden and Felix.

While in Cambridge, Dr. Fuchs applied his training in synaptic electrophysiology to studies of the vertebrate inner ear that continue to this day.  His research is focused on the connectivity of sensory cells and neurons that mediate hearing.  This work helped to uncover the molecular mechanisms of efferent inhibition to the cochlea, and characterized the unusual afferent neurons that may mediate the sensation of painfully loud sound.  His research has been funded continuously by the NIH since 1984 and has been published in over 80 peer-reviewed papers (including Science, Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy) and 30 review chapters. He edited two books on hearing and was a co-author of the fourth and fifth editions of the general neurobiology text, From Neuron to Brain (Sinauer Press).  Dr. Fuchs has lectured in the USA and abroad, including a “Capital Science Evening” at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC and sessions on National Public Radio’s “Science Fridays”.

Dr. Fuchs has conducted scientific training worldwide in workshops and lecture courses in Argentina, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Spain and Uruguay.  In the US he taught neurobiology at NIH, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Jackson Laboratory in Maine, and the Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod, where he directed the NIH-funded laboratory and lecture course, Biology of the Inner Ear from 2013 to 2017.  He has been an advisor to doctoral training programs at Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Colorado.  He has served on advisory and grant review boards at the NIH, including as member and chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors to the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and as member and chair of the AUD Study Section at the Center for Scientific Review at NIH.  He was president of the international Association for Research in Otolaryngology in 2008.

Judy R. Dubno, PhD

Distinguished University Professor
Medical University of South Carolina
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery

Judy R. Dubno grew up in Manhattan (New York City), attended the very competitive Bronx High School of Science, and later earned a PhD from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School and University Center, where her major advisor was Harry Levitt and Gerald Studebaker was a principal mentor. Her dissertation research involved predicting consonant confusions by individuals with normal and impaired hearing from acoustic analyses of consonants. She was also heavily involved in the development, recording, and analysis of the CUNY Nonsense Syllable Test, which was among the first closed-set tests that generated consonant confusion matrices (from paper and pencil responses) and is still in use today. Her doctoral research was part of a large, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project to develop and evaluate methods for the automated selection of hearing-aid specifications using a wearable master hearing aid, one of the first in the analog era, using an early form of a multivariate adaptive testing strategy. Following the PhD, Dr. Dubno became an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA School of Medicine and then joined the faculty at UCLA, where she mentored students, postdocs, and otolaryngology residents, and conducted collaborative research until 1991 when she moved to MUSC.

Dr. Dubno’s research at MUSC focuses primarily on understanding the pathophysiology of presbyacusis and its consequences for communication. A particularly important contribution has been her leadership of a 35-year longitudinal cohort study of age-related hearing loss alongside an exceptional, multidisciplinary, and international team of research colleagues, including program co-founders Jack Mills, Rick Schmiedt, and Brad Schulte. Her research has been funded continuously by NIH and other awards since 1981.

More recently, Dr. Dubno has been participating in research and public service to support improved accessibility and affordability of hearing health care, especially hearing aids, and to enact the necessary federal policies and legislation. This began in 2009 with a partnership with Amy Donahue (then at NIDCD) and Lucille Beck at the VA. She served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee on this topic and is now a member of the Lancet Commission that is addressing the global burden of hearing loss.

Dr. Dubno has mentored many graduate and medical students, postdoctoral fellows, otolaryngology residents, and junior faculty, and was recognized by MUSC with its inaugural mentoring award. The most rewarding moments of Dr. Dubno’s career are seeing those she mentored achieve success in auditory research, teaching, and leadership positions. Throughout her career, Dr. Dubno has benefited from many opportunities to serve and lead scientific societies (including ARO), participate on NASEM boards/committees, and serve the NIH on review and other committees and as a member of the NIDCD Advisory Council. She and her colleagues received Editor’s Awards from the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research and Ear and Hearing and she delivered AAS’s Carhart Memorial Lectureship. Dr. Dubno has been fortunate to receive several national awards and achieved society fellowships in recognition of her research and leadership, and credits her mentors, colleagues, and collaborators at CUNY, UCLA, MUSC, and around the US and the world (and her husband, John) who have contributed immeasurably to her achievements.

Doris Wu, Ph.D.

Doris Wu grew up in Hong Kong, where her mother was a grade-school teacher and her father a civil servant. She has loved biology ever since high school and she came to the United States for college, majoring in Biology and Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point. Still passionate about biology but unsure about her next career move after graduation, she worked as a laboratory technician at the Department of Physiology, School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, where she later obtained her master’s degree in 1978, studying endocrinology of the reproductive system. She then moved across town to the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) to further her graduate work in studying neuronal and glia interactions. Doris received her PhD from now the Department of Neurobiology in 1983. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at the Mental Retardation Center at UCLA, she joined Dr. Constance Cepko’s laboratory at the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. There, she studied cell type determination in the mammalian retina, focusing on the development of a subtype of amacrine cells.

As a sensory system developmental neurobiologist, Doris was drawn to the beauty and complexity of the inner ear structure and although she had never received formal training in this field, she accepted her first independent position at the Intramural program of NIDCD in 1993. She set out to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying the formation of the inner ear. She rose through the ranks at the NIH, and now holds the position of Chief in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, NIDCD. She views her scientific journey as deeply rewarding and complementary to that of many others in the development field who have identified some of the key genes and molecular pathways underlying the formation of this amazing organ. The knowledge gained from these discoveries continues to provide the basis for hair cell regeneration research and for understanding the etiology of hereditary deafness.

Doris has been a single mom since her son was 10 months old. Managing work and family life balance was a challenge when her son was growing up. Now, when she is not visiting her 102-year-old mother in Hong Kong, she enjoys cooking and taking walks while talking to life-long friends in her spare time.

Christoph Eberhard Schreiner, Ph.D, M.D.

Christoph Eberhard Schreiner grew up in a small village in the woods of Northern Germany where his father practiced medicine. Living in a forest and with frequent outings accompanying his father and brother to observe wildlife at dusk and dawn instilled in him a life-long love of nature. Unsurprisingly, Christoph’s favorite subject in high school was biology, closely followed by math and physics. When it was time to select a professional field, however, the quantitative side won out and he started in 1969 to study physics at the University of Göttingen in Lower Saxony. Soon, he joined the Third Institute of Physics working under the tutelage of Prof. Manfred R. Schroeder, his first influential mentor. Prof. Schroeder worked on a wide range of topics, using innovative applications of mathematics to speech, hearing, and concert hall acoustics. There, Christoph learned rigorous quantitative methods and had his first encounter with the concept of modulation transfer functions. However, several projects in the Institute also had links to biology and he chose to write his Masters and Doctoral theses on the psychophysics of the interactions of non-simultaneously presented sounds. This period established his life-long fascination with the sense of hearing.

One basic truth quickly became obvious to him: psychophysical phenomena ultimately must be understood on the basis of the biophysics and physiology of the sensory system. To broaden his perspective on human physiology, Christoph enrolled in medical school right after attaining his Masters degree (Diplom) in 1974. Moreover, after finishing his physics PhD in 1977, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Otto Creutzfeldt, at the Max-Plank-Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, as his first post-doc to embark on actual physiological studies of the auditory system. Prof. Creutzfeldt, his second influential mentor, was a renowned visual neuroscientist, but wished to further develop the study of the auditory system in his Institute. Christoph learned from him the art of complex physiological experiments, and the value of utilizing different levels of analysis, from local, intracellular to cellular to more global, hierarchical levels of resolution. In addition, the Creutzfeldt group, that included the rising stars of Sakmann, Neher, and von der Malsburg, had frequent illustrious visitors (e.g., Eccles, Hubel, Katz) from the world of neuroscience who always provoked deep discussions in the group from neuromathematics to neurophilosophy. In this fertile atmosphere, Christoph wrote his Doctoral Thesis in Medicine about the interaction of non-simultaneously presented sounds in the auditory thalamus and cortex.

After finishing medical school in 1980, Prof. Creutzfeldt suggested that Christoph accept a one-year post-doc in the auditory neurophysiology laboratory of Prof. Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in preparation for taking charge of the Auditory Group at the MPI. This suggestion proved to be of great significance for Christoph’s future life in many ways. First, the Merzenich group, at that time, was engaged in two developments of major impact: they were in the process of developing a multi-channel cochlear implant device and testing it with the first set of patients, achieving highly promising initial results. Second, Dr. Merzenich was establishing, in the somatosensory system, the essential role of experience and life circumstances on the functional and structural organization of cortical fields. Thus, Prof. Merzenich became his third influential mentor by emphasizing the need for careful mapping of target structures and exploiting the role of plasticity in understanding the mechanisms of auditory processing and perception. And last, but not least, while working in the Coleman Laboratory at UCSF during that year, he met his wife, Marcia, an audiologist and fellow auditory neuroscientist. After he returned to the MPI in Germany for a year or so, he decided to follow his heart and returned to the Coleman Laboratory at UCSF where he rose through the academic ranks over the next 35+ years.

By further developing and applying the principles instilled in him by his mentors, and in collaboration with many bright and talented students and postdocs, his work illuminated many key aspects of auditory cortical information processing and their subcortical origins. Major topics include the principles of information transfer and transformation from synaptic to spiking activity, from thalamus to cortex, and from single neurons to coordinated neuronal ensemble activity. A central aspect of many studies was the focus on stimuli with a complexity somewhere between simple sounds, like tones and noise burst, and natural sounds, like vocalizations, in the form of parametrically accessible temporal and spectral stimulus modulations. A number of studies established fundamental aspects of the expression and mechanisms of maturation and experience-driven plasticity in auditory cortex. This was further aided by congenial and inspiring collaborations with the neuroanatomist Prof. Jeffery Winer at UC Berkeley starting in the late nineties. That collaboration also resulted in two jointly conceived and edited books that summarized the basic structure and function of the mammalian Inferior Colliculus and Auditory Cortex.

Supported by the NIH for more than 30 years, he reciprocated by serving on numerous grant review panels, chairing the AUD study section, serving on the NIDCD Council, and representing NIDCD on the Multi-Council Work Group of the BRAIN initiative. He also served for many years on the Tinnitus Research Consortium, a privately funded effort to enhance research into the mechanisms of tinnitus, and as the chair of the scientific advisory board of the large German research cluster ‘Hearing4All’, a broad effort of basic, translational, and applied research to enhance rehabilitative audiology. Another rewarding activity in his profession that he enjoys is mentoring students, post-docs, and junior faculty in his own department, as well as in the neuroscience and bioengineering graduate programs at UCSF and UC Berkeley.

Aside from his professional work, Christoph enjoys world- and science history, antique books, classical music (and some jazz), piano-playing as well as exploring foreign lands. But spending as much time as possible with his wife, and daughter Christina, brings him the most joy. 

Tom C.T. Yin

Tom Chi Tien Yin was born in Kunming, China where his parents had fled to escape the Japanese invasion of northern China before World War II. In 1948 the family emigrated to the US and settled in Denver, CO where his parents were graduate students. When the Communists defeated the Nationalists in China in 1949, the family decided not to return to China. Tom attended public schools in Denver and Aurora, CO and then went to Princeton University, graduating with a major in Electrical Engineering. He then went to graduate school in the same field at the University of Michigan.

After a semester or two in Ann Arbor, he discovered that practically all the research in the Electrical Engineering Department was war-related and sponsored by the Department of Defense during this time of the Vietnam War. Not wanting to support the war effort, he decided to complete the course requirements for a Master’s degree and then join the Peace Corps. However, just before he was to go for Peace Corps training, by chance in the hallway he met Professor William J. Williams who told him that his lab was funded by NIH, not by DOD.

Tom queried, “That sounds nice. What do you do?”

“Bioengineering”, Prof. Williams replied.

“Cool.” Tom replied. Then, after a pause, “But, what’s that?”

At that pivotal moment, Tom put the Peace Corps on hold and decided to explore this new field. Essentially, Williams’ lab applied engineering techniques and analysis to the study of the ultimate communication system, the brain. The next semester, as a third year graduate student, Tom found himself trying to shore up his meager 9th grade Biology background in a large introductory Biology course surrounded by hundreds of pre-medical freshmen students. Tom’s thesis was a study of the transfer characteristics of neurons in the thalamus relaying information about joint angle. The classic work in this system was by Vernon Mountcastle of Johns Hopkins University so Tom arranged to do a post-doc in his lab following a conversation at the first meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Before his funding for the post-doc at JHU could start, Tom had a six-month gap so he decided to fill that time with a short post-doc at the SUNY at Buffalo in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles. Since Tom’s parents had moved to Buffalo by this time, he could stay with them while working on an ‘electroanatomy’ experiment studying cerebral inputs to the cerebellum, which proved to be surprisingly fortuitous when he was looking for a faculty position. At JHU Tom studied the visuomotor properties of neurons in the posterior parietal cortex of an awake, behaving monkey, which underscored an interest in behavior for the rest of his career.

In 1977 Tom was recruited to join the Department of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin with the requirement to teach motor systems. With his background in cerebellar research, he qualified. During his first year in Madison while waiting for his NIH grant to be funded, he teamed up with Shigeyuki Kuwada who was a post-doc with Jerzy Rose to study the binaural response properties of cells in the inferior colliculus. Neither Shig nor Tom had previous experience in auditory physiology but there was excellent local expertise in the Department in Madison. This was the start of a career-changing interest in the auditory system and a life-long friendship and collaboration with Shig. While Tom continued his visuomotor experiments after Shig left, the lure of the fascinating cells sensitive to microsecond differences in timing of inputs to the two ears was irresistible and his research efforts eventually focused on the lower auditory brainstem from the auditory nerve, cochlear nucleus, inferior colliculus and superior colliculus. These experiments combined intra- and extracellular recordings along with injections of intracellular markers to study relevant physiological responses and important circuitry properties of the auditory brainstem pathways using state-of-the-art digital acoustic stimuli.

In addition to experiments addressing circuitry issues, Tom’s lab also embarked on a systematic study of sound localization behavior of cats with the goal of linking neurophysiological responses to behavior. Cats were trained on a sound localization task to direct their gaze at sound sources using operant training. In addition to several studies quantifying the psychophysics of sound localization, Tom and his colleagues also correlated neurophysiological responses in the inferior colliculus while the cat was experiencing the precedence effect, one of the first studies in the auditory system to correlate physiology with behavior in a behaving animal..

An important factor in Tom’s research success was the cohort of exceptional students, post-docs, sabbatical faculty, and technicians that he worked with in Madison over the years. He is indebted to the hard work and brilliance of Laurel Carney, Joseph Chan, Micheal Dent, Bertrand Delgutte, Yan Gai, Melissa Greenwood, Judith Hirsch, Dexter Irvine, Amy Jones, Philip Joris, Shig Kuwada, Ruth Litovsky, Liz McClaine, Jordan Moore, Luis Populin, Janet Ruhland, Phil Smith and Dan Tollin. In addition the faculty and staff of the Department provided invaluable advice, counsel and assistance on matters ranging from the details of earphone calibration, histological preparation of brain tissue, computer programming, construction of laboratory equipment, to the preparation of grant applications. Over his 39-year tenure, Tom’s research was funded without interruption and on the first submission from NIH, usually with two grants. He also served as a permanent member on three different NIH study sections as well as chairing and participating in numerous NIH site visits. He was the inaugural awardee of the William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience from the Acoustical Society of America in 2013.

Throughout Tom’s professional stint as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, he has been deeply engaged in teaching, initially motor systems to first-year medical students and then transitioning to graduate and undergraduate students. After 20 years of teaching medical students, Tom teamed up with Professor Richard Keesey of the Department of Psychology in 1997 to start an introductory systems neuroscience course for undergraduates. It is unusual for faculty in the Medical School to be involved in undergraduate teaching and this was done on top of his normal teaching requirements. Over the years this course became quite popular with enrollments of almost 200 students and it became the backbone of a new undergraduate major in neurobiology. After Prof. Keesey retired in 2001, Tom taught the whole course with the assistance of a TA or two for whom the course provided a training forum for teaching. Tom believed that science education at all levels was important and led numerous community outreach visits to local elementary and junior high schools where cow eye dissections were always a hit. In 2003 he received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in a campus-wide competition.

In addition to research and teaching, Tom has also had major administrative roles. In 2006 he was elected to be Director of the campus-wide Neuroscience Training Program, which is the graduate program at the Univ. of Wisconsin, supporting about 70 graduate students working with 120 faculty members. He wrote two successful training grant renewal applications for the program. In 2004 he wrote a new T90 training grant for Clinical Neuroengineering and directed the program for the first 5 years. In 2011 the Medical School realigned the departments of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology into a newly established Department of Neuroscience, for which Tom was the first chair and directed the successful promotion of 5 faculty members and the move of the departmental faculty to a new building.

To students just starting on a research path, it is noteworthy that the arc of Tom’s career was quite untraditional, as he was fortunate to experience several serendipitous events. Changing to a completely different research area in the middle of graduate school after a chance encounter in the hallway, doing a short post-doc on the cerebellum to facilitate finding a faculty job teaching motor systems, and pairing up with Shig Kuwada to start research on the auditory system were all certainly unplanned. The important aspect is to be prepared to take advantage of good luck.

In retirement Tom has continued to teach graduate students, but he has much more time now to enjoy his marriage of 48 years to Lillian Tong, two marvelous children, Eric and Laura, and three wonderful grandkids. His major hobby is photography with particular interest in nature, wildlife, and travel. He enjoys visiting new places and hiking to areas to see wildlife in their natural setting. He has a travel/photo blog of trips on www.neurotraveler.com and a photo site on Flickr which can be seen at https://www.flickr.com/gp/tctyin/54BL24.

Lynne Werner, PhD

Lynne Ann Werner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The oldest of seven children, she describes her childhood as “unremarkable.” She received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. Having sampled majors in biology, chemistry, education, and anthropology, she finally settled on psychology.

Following graduation, Lynne stayed in the Chicago area and began graduate school at Loyola University of Chicago, in the lab of Debbie Holmes, a developmental psychologist working mostly on visual perceptual development. In the Holmes lab she began her lifelong adventure toward discovering what human infants hear, completing a dissertation entitled “Auditory frequency analysis in infancy” in addition to several other papers on visual attention and a neurophysiology study on the goldfish 8th nerve with Richard Fay. Lynne then took a position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Soon after that she was enticed to move her lab to the University of Virginia, and then in 1986 she moved to the University of Washington, where she rapidly rose to Full Professor with Tenure. She officially retired and became Professor Emeritus in 2017, but still continues to mentor junior scientists and to collaborate on research in other labs.

Early in her career, Lynne began running in her efforts to quit smoking. She ran her first marathon a year later and has since run nearly 200 marathons and ultramarathons. She no longer smokes. Lynne’s other interests include baseball, classical music and opera, theater, train travel, beer,
cooking, camping, and hiking. Lynne has been married to David Olsho for 48 years. David is also a runner. They have two daughters: Lauren Olsho is a health economist with a research focus on nutrition and risky behavior; Alexis Olsho is a researcher in physics education. Lynne and David have three grandchildren, Daisy, Sidney, and Willa, all of whom she describes as “sweet”, “smart,” and “good runners”.

When Lynne started her work on infant hearing in the 1980s, there were few quantitative behavioral data on young infants. There were careful observations of responses to a variety of acoustic stimuli, and there were studies based on the habituation of infant responses to sound that allowed researchers to determine whether infants could discriminate between two quite different sounds. However, these paradigms did not allow researchers to quantify infant sensitivity or to compare infants and adults directly. The conditioned head-turn procedure developed by researchers at the University of Washington was a great advance that
allowed for estimation of both detection and discrimination thresholds in the clinic as well as in the lab. Unfortunately, the conditioned head-turn technique does not yield reliable results for infants younger than about 6 months of age.

In 1987, Lynne and her colleagues introduced a major paradigm shift in the study of infant hearing, the Observerbased Psychophysical Procedure (OPP). This procedure combines the conditioned head-turn technique and the forced-choice preferential looking procedure, developed for infant vision studies by Davida Teller at University of Washington. This method actually tests the ability of a trained observer to detect a sound or a change in a sound using only the infant’s behavior as evidence. It is incredibly powerful and has allowed the collection of reliable psychophysical data on a large variety of acoustic parameters in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired infants as young as a few weeks old.

Armed with this new, powerful methodology, Lynne’s lab produced a series of remarkable studies that told us how infants detect, discriminate, or categorize acoustic stimuli. Among the important findings of her experiments, is that while some infant perceptual skills are surprisingly mature by 6 months of age (e.g., high frequency discrimination, low frequency resolution, and pitch categorization), other percepts remain immature, even as infants begin to acquire their first words (e.g., gap detection and spectral ripple discrimination). During this period, Lynne not only trained her students in OPP, but opened her lab to colleagues from the US and abroad who learned the OPP procedure and applied it to a variety of research questions. It is not an overstatement to say the research from Lynne’s lab is the pillar upon which Developmental Psychoacoustics is built.

Age-related improvements in auditory performance were sometimes attributed to failures of attention, memory, or general “efficiency”. While such effects were considered uninteresting to some hearing researchers, Lynne and the members of her lab demonstrated that such cognitive factors had a direct effect of infants’ perception. For example, one reason that infants are worse than adults at detecting a tone in noise is that while adults listen selectively for a particular frequency, infants listen broadly across frequency. One consequence is that infants are actually better than adults at detecting unexpected tones. The idea that listening strategy changes during infancy and childhood has broad implications for our understanding of the development of speech perception and for pediatric audiology.

Another facet of Lynne’s research contribution is her attempts to interpret her behavioral results in the context of our emerging understanding of the physiology and pharmacology of the auditory periphery and the brain. This is apparent in her early work, in her collaborations relating psychophysical measures to conductive, cochlear and brainstem measures in infants, and in her recent studies of hearing-impaired children. It is most apparent in her book entitled “Human Auditory Development” and in the many superb chapters she has authored and co-authored.

Lynne’s work has been widely recognized. Her R01 grant “Development of Frequency Resolution” was continuously funded, first by NINCDS then by NIDCD, from 1985 to 2018. She was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America in 2002. Since arriving at the University of Washington she has served as the research advisor to 26 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. She was recognized as Outstanding Mentor by the Student Council of the Acoustical Society in 2018.

Finally, in order to understand what makes Lynne Werner an outstanding recipient of the 2020 ARO Award of Merit, it is important to understand her commitment to her colleagues and the fields of Auditory Science. She served on or chaired more than 30 university and national committees and was principal investigator on conference grants, core grants, and a training grant. While this shows her commitment and leadership outside the lab, her commitment to her colleagues has always been a top priority. We have never seen her turn down a request to help with a grant or a paper, or provide advice, or attend a practice talk. Every letter for this nomination stressed Lynne’s commitment as a mentor and colleague and her leadership as a role model for women in science. Her students and colleagues are thrilled that Lynne Ann Werner is receiving the Award of Merit from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

Peter M. Narins, PhD

Internationally renowned for his elegant research and eloquent lectures, Peter Narins has been selected for the 2019 ARO Award of Merit for his significant impact on the field of auditory neuroscience. Peter received his B.S. and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. After volunteering for three years with the Peace Corps in Chile, he returned to Cornell to earn his Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior under the supervision of Robert R. Capranica. He then moved to the University of Keele for a postdoctoral fellowship to learn mammalian auditory physiology with Edward F. Evans, and later returned to the United States to join the faculty at UCLA, where he rapidly rose through the ranks to become Distinguished Professor of Integrative Biology & Physiology and of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Peter’s numerous honors and awards include election to the rank of Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and four scientific societies -- the Acoustical Society of America, the Animal Behavior Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Society for Neuroethology. He has been named a Grass Fellow at Woods Hole, and has also been the recipient of a Senior Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and an Award from the Fulbright Scholar Program. Peter has also served the International Society for Neuroethology as Council Member, Treasurer, and President. He is an Honorary Member of the Cuban Zoological Society and Professor Ad Honorem at the University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay.

At the cornerstone of Peter’s major scientific contributions is the application of principles from engineering to the study of hearing. Using anuran amphibians (frogs and toads) as his primary experimental model, he pioneered a research strategy that integrated an analysis of the mechanics and physiology of hearing in the well-controlled laboratory setting with elegantly-designed field experiments in the acoustically-messy and complex real world environments in which animals actually have to hear, listen, and act. By this approach, he showed definitively what was once considered to be a “simple” ear is actually quite complex and reveals many surprises. As just one example, Peter developed a method based on laser Doppler interferometry to measure the vibrations of the eardrum of the Puerto Rican coqui frog in response to ambient and self-generated sounds. This led to the discovery of the mechanism that prevents the inner ear from being overstimulated when the frog produces long, almost uninterrupted series of advertisement calls at intensities of more than 110 dB SPL. In a series of painstaking measurements, Peter discovered that sounds generated by the vocal cords, after being radiated from the vocal sac, impinge both on the inner and on the outer surfaces of the tympanic membrane. If the sounds arrive nearly in phase, then the tympanic membrane does not move much, even when stimulated with sounds of high intensity. To verify the idea that the frog’s ear acts as a pressure-gradient receiver, Peter then transported his laser vibrometer into the Puerto Rican rain forest, and in a truly arduous and elegant endeavor repeated the same delicate measurements in frogs engaged in natural chorusing behaviors. This series of experiments has stimulated similar research in reptiles and birds, and it is now believed that a pressure-gradient receiver represents the original rather than the derived design of the vertebrate ear.

Peter’s scientific efforts have produced a series of unique and surprising discoveries. Again using laser vibrometry, he was the first to show that the coqui frog can detect sounds, not only through its tympanic membrane, but also through its body walls (an extratympanic pathway). He was the first to provide neurophysiological evidence suggesting that the amphibian papilla in the frog’s inner ear may support a mechanical traveling wave on its tectorial membrane, an idea initially rejected because this animal lacks a basilar membrane with the usual tapered dimensions from base-to-apex. He was the first to quantify similarities and differences in phase-locking properties of amphibian and mammalian auditory nerve fibers, an important finding for understanding the evolution and operation of a time-coding mechanism in the inner ear. Peter and his team also demonstrated temperature-dependence of auditory nerve response properties and two-tone rate suppression in the frog. This work not only contributed to our understanding of auditory processing in vertebrates, but also stimulated another line of investigation, namely the contribution of stochastic resonance to stimulus detection. He took advantage of the observation that temperature affects noise in the nervous system to systematically measure auditory detection under experimentally controlled noise levels. This work offers the compelling insight that temperature (and noise) can affect information transfer in the anuran peripheral auditory system. Going back to the field, Peter showed that male white-lipped frogs use seismic “thumps” as well as advertisement calls to communicate within choruses. Following up this observation with electrophysiological experiments in a long and fruitful collaboration with Ted Lewis, he then demonstrated that the inner ears of these frogs are much more sensitive to seismic signals than expected from research with other terrestrial animals. In a parallel study of seismic communication with Ted, Dr. Narins demonstrated that the functionally blind Namib Desert golden mole uses seismic cues alone to locate food sources.

Peter designed and implemented electromechanical robotic models to demonstrate that a highly territorial South American dendrobatid frog uses a combination of acoustic cues (advertisement calls) and visual signals (vocal-sac pulsations) to evoke aggressive behavior. In a landmark field study, Peter and his students demonstrated that both the pitch and the timing of the calls of the Puerto Rican Coqui treefrog change in a similar fashion along an altitudinal gradient. By recording DPOAEs from frogs captured at different altitudes on a tropical mountain, they demonstrated that the call frequencies and auditory tuning are closely matched at all altitudes. Moreover, in a set of field experiments spanning a 23-year period, Peter and his team demonstrated that the spectral and temporal parameters of the calls of the Puerto Rican Coqui have shifted in the amount and direction consistent with the observed temperature rise in Puerto Rico over that same period. These results formed the basis of an argument that minute changes in frog calls over time can be used for monitoring global warming. And finally, he along with Albert Feng were the leaders of an international team of scientists that made the extraordinary discovery that the concave-eared torrent frog, a species living in central China, produces and hears ultrasound to avoid masking from the intense broadband noise generated by surrounding waterfalls. This finding was truly astonishing, as most frogs and toads communicate and hear at frequencies below 5 kHz. Peter and colleagues have now identified other species of frogs in Asia that similarly communicate in the ultrasound range.

As a faculty member, Peter has been a champion of early career scientists around the world; he has taught and continues to teach courses and mentored graduate students, postdocs, and young faculty in the U.S., Cuba, Europe, Asia, and South America. He is a superb classroom teacher, as is evident from his numerous teaching awards from UCLA. He runs a vibrant and productive laboratory and has developed collaborations with scientists all over the world. He has also served the auditory community through his extensive editorial work. He is highly respected, not only as a scientist and educator, but also as a kind, forthright, and loyal friend, with the utmost integrity.

Peter has been married for nearly 50 years to Olivia Gubler, whom he met while serving with the Peace Corps in Chile. Peter and Olivia have two married children, Tom and Astrid, two grandchildren, Nicole and Ryan, and a third on the way. Peter enjoys traveling to places that are off-the-beaten track, Travis-picking on the guitar, amateur radio communication, especially using Morse Code, birding, frogging and spending time with his growing family.

We congratulate Peter on this well-deserved honor.

Andrea Megela Simmons
Brown University

Cynthia F. Moss
Johns Hopkins University