The development and function of the mammalian auditory circuitry

Professor Marcotti is studying how the auditory system develops and operates normally, and how defects at the molecular level can lead to deafness. He is doing this by investigating the physiological properties of the individual sensory hair cells of the mammalian cochlea, using electrophysiological, calcium-imaging and molecular-biology techniques. He will apply these techniques to unravel the physiological and genetic mechanisms that lead to the assembly of the proteins required for sound encoding, and, in so doing, aims to discover how inner hair cell synapses control the transfer of sound information to auditory fibres in vitro and in vivo.