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 9^th 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.