📌 Eligibility:
Professional Research Assistants or staff in comparable roles are eligible.

📝 How to Apply:
Nominate a colleague, advisor, or even yourself!
Submit a nomination letter, job history, and 1–3 reference letters to:
📧 Fadul.Award@ucdenver.edu

🔗 tinyurl.com/fadul-awards

Clinically, the findings emphasize the importance of detecting and treating even temporary pediatric hearing loss to prevent enduring effects on spatial hearing and long-term speech and language development.

🎉 Congrats to Daniel Tollin and Nathaniel Greene on yet another achievement! 👏🥳

These deficits persist even after the hearing loss resolves. The research found that deprivation in infancy or childhood—unlike adult-onset loss—produced significant brainstem and behavioral changes, identifying a critical period for developing binaural hearing circuitry.

🧩 This discovery overturns the long-held assumption that inhibitory neurons act as simple relays, showing instead that their dendrites perform specialized computations that sculpt the timing and flow of cortical activity. 🧠🔬

⚡ Fast-spiking parvalbumin (PV) cells integrate inputs sublinearly, limiting their response and enabling rapid, precisely timed inhibition.

🌊 In contrast, somatostatin (SST) cells integrate supralinearly through NMDA receptors, amplifying inputs to produce slower, more sustained inhibition.

Until now, it was unclear how different inhibitory neurons in the neocortex combine their many inputs to shape brain activity. This study reveals that each interneuron type can have its own distinct dendritic computation.

The researchers suspect age, lifestyle and other factors contribute - no two humans are the same, making it difficult to study. 🔬 Preclinical models will help dissect the problem into components. Expected outcome: treatments for patients with hearing in noise problems! 3/3

Many people, especially older people and people who have had significant noise exposure (factory work, military service) complain about inability to isolate sounds of interest from background chatter, though their hearing is completely normal. 👂 Hearing aids won't solve this! 2/3

Meet Dr. Achim Klug, a proffessor at the Physiology and Biophysics department here at CU Anschutz.

The Klug Lab has studied this problem for many years both in human subjects and animal models.

🔗 youtube.com/watch?v=WXWjq855pPE&t=3s

Dr. Li ‘s background in both electrical engineering and neuroscience will allow him unique insights into this problem, with the long term goal to help develop neural prosthesis for patients with hearing loss.👂💡

Using electrophysiology and structural biology, her lab reveals how these channels work.

Learn more ⬇

🔗 tinyurl.com/2whd7apv

The findings have broad implications for understanding ion channel physiology, channelopathies, and drug design, particularly in the context of therapeutics targeting inactivated channel states.

In addition, an old puzzle about how external potassium speeds recovery from inactivation is also resolved; instead of positively charged potassium pushing the plug out, it reshapes allosterically the selectivity filter, which indirectly destabilizes the N-type plug.

This discovery provides new insight into how RNA editing controls fast inactivation in Kv channels. The study also shows that channel opening rearranges hydrophobic residues, facilitating the plug's insertion.

Unlike previous models that suggested a ball-and-chain mechanism, this plug is a linear stretch of amino acids. Additionally, the first amino acid of this tail, methionine, is removed and replaced with acetylated alanine, which helps it bind to a pore-lining site regulated by RNA editing.