Postion will start August 2024
The Department of Psychology at the University at Buffalo (UB), The State University of New York, announces a cluster hire in the area of disparities in psychological well-being (broadly defined) across the lifespan. This cluster hire consists of three tenure-track faculty hires, one at the rank of advanced Associate or Full Professor and two at the rank of Assistant or early Associate Professor. We expect at least one of these hires will focus on the issue of disparities in learning processes and outcomes. These hires are part of a disciplinary excellence investment in the Department of Psychology, with the goal of building on UB’s strength in collaborative and translational research, and on departmental expertise in issues of equity in psychological well-being.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward how structural inequities may undermine mental and physical well-being, creating stark disparities among individuals and communities. Another aspect of inequity that has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic relates to structural inequities in early learning, cognition, and educational achievement, all of which are critical predictors of long-term mental health and wellness. The core of these disparities lies in how humans interact with their environments, how they respond to stress and adversity, what constitutes resilience, and how people access and understand health information.
The Department of Psychology and UB is committed to using research, teaching, and public outreach programs to better understand and ameliorate such structural disparities. The goal of these cluster hires is to bring together scholars focused on addressing the ways in which the field of Psychology can seek to understand and ultimately to ameliorate inequity.
The specific area within Psychology is open, as is the particular lifespan focus, which could include early childhood to late-life development. As a department we have particular strengths in several key domains of psychological science from “neurons to neighborhoods” (i.e., biological, clinical, cognitive, developmental, and social) and hires within this disciplinary excellence initiative could align with any of these or other perspectives to address disparities across the lifespan.
Those with cognitive-based interests could have expertise in understanding the basis of deficits in basic mental processes such as memory, language comprehension, action planning, and perception. Individuals who can complement the University’s Learning Science initiative (insert link: https://ed.buffalo.edu/research/projects/learning-sciences-initiative.html), whose work addresses disparities in early cognition, learning, and educational achievement, or that addresses inequities in from a developmental perspective (including cognitive aging) are particularly encouraged.
Those with neuroscience-based interests could have expertise in the understanding the biological determinants of individuals’ stress vulnerability and resilience, the neural consequences of early life adversity and resource scarcity, or the emergence and decline of complex sensory or cognitive processes. Research programs using animal models of psychological processes or laboratory-based measures of neural activity are encouraged.
To apply for this job please visit www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu.
Kirupa Suthakar, PhD - Dr Kirupa Suthakar is a postdoctoral fellow at NIH/NIDCD, having formerly trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and doctoral student at Garvan Institute of Medical Research/UNSW Australia. Kirupa's interest in the mind and particular fascination by how we are able to perceive the world around us led her to pursue a research career in auditory neuroscience. To date, Kirupa's research has broadly focused on neurons within the auditory efferent circuit, which allow the brain to modulate incoming sound signals at the ear. Kirupa is active member of the spARO community, serving as the Chair Elect for 2021.
Charles C. Della Santina, PhD MD is a Professor of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he directs the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Implant Center and the Johns Hopkins Vestibular NeuroEngineering Laboratory.
Andrew Griffith received his MD and PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1992. He completed his general surgery internship and a residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Michigan in 1998. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Human Genetics as part of his training at the University of Michigan. In 1998, he joined the Division of Intramural Research (DIR) in the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). He served as a senior investigator, the chief of the Molecular Biology and Genetics Section, the chief of the Otolaryngology Branch, and the director of the DIR, as well as the deputy director for Intramural Clinical Research across the NIH Intramural Research Program. His research program identifies and characterizes molecular and cellular mechanisms of normal and disordered hearing and balance in humans and mouse models. Two primary interests of his program have been hearing loss associated with enlargement of the vestibular aqueduct, and the function of TMC genes and proteins. The latter work lead to the discovery that the deafness gene product TMC1 is a component of the hair cell sensory transduction channel. Since July of 2020, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean of Research and a Professor of Otolaryngology and Physiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
Gwenaëlle S. G. Géléoc obtained a PhD in Sensory Neurobiology from the University of Sciences in Montpellier (France) in 1996. She performed part of her PhD training at the University of Sussex, UK where she characterized sensory transduction in vestibular hair cells and a performed a comparative study between vestibular and cochlear hair cells. Gwenaelle continued her training as an electrophysiologist at University College London studying outer hair cell motility and at Harvard Medical School studying modulation of mechanotransduction in vestibular hair cells. As an independent investigator at the University of Virginia, she expanded this work and characterized the developmental acquisition of sensory transduction in mouse vestibular hair cells, the developmental acquisition of voltage-sensitive conductances in vestibular hair cells and the tonotopic gradient in the acquisition of sensory transduction in the mouse cochlea. This work along with quantitative spatio-temporal studies performed on several hair cell mechanotransduction candidates lead her to TMC1 and 2 and long-term collaborations with Andrew Griffith and Jeff Holt. Dr. Géléoc is currently Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology, at Boston Children’s Hospital where she continues to study molecular players involved in the development and function of hair cells of the inner ear and develops new therapies for the treatment of deafness and balance, with a particular focus on Usher syndrome.
Jeff Holt earned a doctorate from the Department of Physiology at the University of Rochester in 1995 for his studies of inward rectifier potassium channels in saccular hair cells. He went on to a post-doctoral position in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he characterized sensory transduction and adaptation in hair cells and developed a viral vector system to transfect cultured hair cells. Dr. Holt’s first faculty position was in the Neuroscience Department at the University of Virginia. In 2011 the lab moved to Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School. Dr. Holt is currently a Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology and Neurology in the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center. Dr. Holt and his team have been studying sensory transduction in auditory and vestibular hair cells over the past 20 years, with particular focus on TMC1 and TMC2 over the past 12 years. This work lead to the discovery that TMC1 forms the hair cell transduction channel. His work also focuses on development gene therapy strategies for genetic hearing loss.
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