Core Center

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goals of the Core Center remain as before to: bring together 17 investigators working on different aspects of hearing and communication disorders, increase the efficiency and productivity of their individual efforts and ongoing collaborations, integrate investigators studying basic hearing mechanisms in animals with investigators studying human hearing impairment. This provides new and sometimes unique opportunities for creative and developing collaborations to reach fruition. The investigators participating in this application represent a broad range of hearing science from anatomy and physiology of hearing in insects to the psychoacoustics of complex sound perception in hearing impaired humans. Existing projects include sound localization in bats and birds, prey-predator interactions in insects and bats, hair cell regeneration in fish and birds, recovery of hearing and vocalizations in birds following hair cell regeneration, MIG imaging of language processes in humans, precision of time resolution in bats, birds, normal, hearing impaired, and aged humans, and the ontogeny of complex acoustic perception in insects, fish, birds, and humans. Taken together, this group of investigators and topics in hearing science is probably the most diverse in existence. The support of the P30 mechanism is essential in keeping a high level of interactive integrity and productivity. Core 1 Imaging Core Director: Arthur N. Popper, Ph.D. Description (provided by applicant): The Imaging Core is designed to enhance and broaden Core member's abilities to use state-of-the-art imaging facilities at the University of Maryland. The Core will take advantage not only of the current facility in the Laboratory for Biological Ultrastructure (LBU) to carry out transmission electron, scanning electron, and confocal microscopy and for tissue preparation, but also a new EM facility with very high-end TEM's and a new 2-photon confocal microscopy facility. However, despite having outstanding facilities for our investigators, there is limited assistance available to users of the various imaging facilities, and no training or consultation is routinely provided. Central to the Core's strategy is hiring a doctoral-level support person whose primary responsibility will be to enhance the research efforts in the Core faculty's labs by introducing new imaging techniques and innovative uses of established techniques. The support person will be supervised by the Core Director (Popper) and a Steering Committee consisting of the Core Director and the directors of the imaging facilities being used by our investigators. This Core will provide advanced capabilities to the labs already using imaging as a main component of their research and will encourage and assist other less frequent users in becoming more effective users of imaging technology. This will ultimately lead to new collaborative research efforts that would not otherwise be possible, or even imagined (e.g., comparing hair cell ontogeny in fish and birds). Because of the unique constellations of users involved, a particularly innovative use of this Core is the porting of invertebrate techniques to vertebrates and vice versa.