Academic Title(s)

• Associate Professor of Neurobiology

Administrative Title(s)

• Director, Hearing Research Group

Bio

How does the brain make sense of complex sounds in our environment? Growing up as a musician, I noticed that my friends with perfect pitch heard sound fundamentally differently. This curiosity led me to study how neural circuits allow reliable auditory perception.

For my Ph.D. at Duke University I studied songbirds, whose ability to sing is essential for reproductive success. I examined mechanisms underlying neural selectivity for song.

As a postdoc at Cornell University, I studied a fly whose reproductive success relies on locating chirping crickets (on which to deposit eggs) while avoiding predation by calling bats. I measured neural and behavioral responses allowing the fly to make this distinction.

In a postdoc at New York University, I began work which I continue in my own lab: I study Mongolian gerbils, which communicate at pitches similar to those in human speech.

I am now funded by NIH to study the effects of developmental stress and hearing loss on perception and the brain.

Educational Background

• Ph.D., Neurobiology, Duke University, 2002
• M.S., Neuroscience, Brandeis University, 1995
• B.A. with Honors, Psychology/Music, Wesleyan University, 1990

Courses

• Medical Neuroscience (Medical and Graduate Students)
• Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology (Graduate Students)
• Current Research in Auditory Neurobiology (Graduate Students)
• Topics in Statistical and Data Analysis (Graduate Students)

Academic & Professional Activities

• President, Northeast Ohio Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience
• Vice-Chair, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)

AREA OF EXPERTISE/RESEARCH INTERESTS

Early life experiences have lasting effects on neural circuits, which can influence a wide range of abilities and characteristics. Childhood hearing problems, particularly in stressful environments, affect our ability to optimally understand speech later in life. My research applies neurophysiological, neurochemical, behavioral, and quantitative techniques in an animal model to understand how developmental hearing loss and stress change the neural circuits necessary for auditory perception. This work lets us identify interventions to remediate perceptual deficits arising from these early detrimental experiences.

Awards

• NIH/NIDCD R01 DC013314, Principal Investigator. Auditory processing deficits in early-onset conductive hearing loss. 4/01/14 – 7/31/2025
• NIH/NIDCD R01DC019126, Co-Principal Investigator. Cortical processing of informational masking. 8/1/2020 – 7/31/2025
• Akron Children’s Hospital Foundation Research Grant, Co-Principal Investigator. Factors affecting long-term speech and hearing outcomes for children with chronic middle ear infections. 9/01/19 – 8/31/22

Publications

Ye Y, Mattingly MM, Sunthimer MJ, Gay JD, Rosen MJ (2023). Early-Life Stress Impairs Perception and Neural Encoding of Rapid Signals in the Auditory Pathway. Journal of Neuroscience.

Ye Y, Ihlefeld A and Rosen MJ (2021). Conductive hearing loss during development does not appreciably alter the sharpness of cochlear tuning. Scientific Reports, 11(1):3955.

Gay JD, Rosen MJ and Huyck JJ (2020). Effects of gap position on perceptual gap detection across late childhood and adolescence. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 21(3): 243-258.

Mattingly MM, Donell BM and Rosen MJ (2018). Late maturation of backward masking in auditory cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 120(4): 1558-1578.

Green DB, Mattingly MM, Ye Y, Gay JD, Rosen MJ (2017). Brief stimulus exposure fully remediates temporal processing deficits induced by early hearing loss. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(32): 7759-7771.