We are please to announce that the Oghalai Lab recently received two new grants from the NIH.

The first grant is for an investigation of the Cochlear Mechanics in the Mouse. The grant will run from April  2015 through the end of March 2020.

The grant is for a study to non-invasively image the vibrations of the organ of Corti in mice, and the hair cells to gain a better understanding of how these structures work together to create high auditory sensitivity and sharp frequency tuning. “This understanding is clinically important because while hearing aids can compensate for the loss of sensitivity, we have no treatments for the loss of frequency tuning.”

The second grant is for, Optical Coherence Tomography for 3D measures of cochlear mechanics in vivo.  This grant will run from April 2014 to the end of March 2020, as well.

This grant also involves the non-invasive imaging of the organ of Corti and the stimulated hair cells during hearing. However, in this grant the Oghalai Lab proposes to develop the technology to image these vibrations non-invasively in 3D. In doing this, “we will then determine the impact of outer hair cell passive stiffness and active force generation on the vibratory patterns using transgenic mouse strains.”

Congratulations to the Oghalai Lab on these new grants and we look forward to sharing the resulting research in the future.