Core Center

核心中心的总体目标与以前一样：汇集17名研究听力和沟通障碍不同方面的研究人员，提高他们个人努力和持续合作的效率和生产力，整合研究动物基本听力机制的研究人员与研究人类听力障碍的研究人员。这为创造性和发展性的合作提供了新的、有时是独特的机会，以取得成果。参与这项申请的研究人员代表了广泛的听觉科学，从昆虫听觉的解剖学和生理学到听力受损人类复杂声音感知的心理声学。现有的项目包括蝙蝠和鸟类的声音定位，昆虫和蝙蝠的捕食者相互作用，鱼类和鸟类的毛细胞再生，毛细胞再生后鸟类的听力和发声恢复，人类语言过程的快速成像，蝙蝠，鸟类，正常人，听力受损者和老年人的时间分辨率精度，以及昆虫，鱼类，鸟类，还有人类总的来说，这组研究人员和听力科学的主题可能是最多样化的。P30机制的支持对于保持高水平的互动完整性和生产力至关重要。 芯1 成像核心 主任：亚瑟N. Popper博士 描述（由申请人提供）：成像核心旨在提高和扩大核心成员的能力，使用国家的最先进的成像设施在马里兰州大学。该核心将不仅利用生物超微结构实验室（LBU）的现有设施进行透射电子，扫描电子和共聚焦显微镜和组织制备，而且还利用一个新的EM设施，具有非常高端的TEM和一个新的双光子共聚焦显微镜设施。然而，尽管为我们的研究者提供了出色的设施，但对各种成像设施的用户提供的帮助有限，并且没有定期提供培训或咨询。核心战略的核心是聘请一名博士级支持人员，其主要职责是通过引入新的成像技术和对现有技术的创新使用，加强核心教师实验室的研究工作。支持人员将由核心主任（Popper）和指导委员会监督，指导委员会由核心主任和研究者使用的成像设施的主任组成。该核心将为已经使用成像作为其研究主要组成部分的实验室提供先进的功能，并将鼓励和帮助其他不太频繁的用户成为成像技术的更有效的用户。这将最终导致新的合作研究工作，否则将是不可能的，甚至想象（例如，比较鱼类和鸟类的毛细胞个体发育）。由于所涉及的用户群独特，该核心的一个特别创新的用途是将无脊椎动物技术移植到脊椎动物，反之亦然。

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.