Abstract:
The interplay between hearing and vocalization is critical to vocal communication and vocal learning. Recent research using both songbirds and mice has provided keen insights into the neural circuits and mechanisms that mediate this sensorimotor interplay. This lecture will cover recent progress in understanding how auditory experience engages and shapes motor systems to enable vocal learning, how motor systems modulate hearing during vocalization and other movements, and the neural circuitry that produces vocalizations used for social communication.
Biography:
Richard Mooney, Ph.D., has served as a George Barth Geller Professor of Research in Neurobiology since 2010. He joined Duke’s Department of Neurobiology in 1994. Dr. Mooney’s research examines the role of auditory experience in the development of brain and behavior, and the interplay between auditory and motor brain regions that enables vocal communication. He and his colleagues have identified how auditory experience alters the structure and function of nerve cells important to learned vocal communication, how these neurons are activated during expressive and receptive aspects of vocal communication, and the link between the auditory properties of these neurons and vocal perception. His group uses a wide variety of methods to this end, including in vivo multiphoton imaging and electrophysiological recordings of neurons in freely vocalizing animals, viral methods to manipulate gene expression in neurons, and acoustic analysis of vocalizations. Dr. Mooney has received a Wiersma Visiting Professorship at Caltech, a Dart Foundation Scholar’s Award, a McKnight Investigator Award, a Sloane Research Fellowship, a Klingenstein Research Fellowship and a Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship. He was also honored to receive the Master Teaching Award, the Davison Teaching Award and the Langford Prize from Duke University. Dr. Mooney earned a B.S. in Biology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology in the Duke University School of Medicine.