Academic Title(s)

• Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology
• Graduate Faculty Advsg Status College of Graduate Studies

Administrative Title(s)

• Associate Dean of Research, College of Medicine

Bio

I received my Ph.D. in Physiology (Neuroscience minor) from Indiana University in Bloomington. After postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California at Berkeley, I came to NEOMED in 1990. Since then, I have trained medical students in the neurosciences and have taken a major role in graduate education in neuroscience, both through mentoring Ph.D. students and serving as Chair of the Neuroscience Graduate Program affiliated with Kent State University. I have served as Chair of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology since its inception in 2008. With 16 tenure track/permanent faculty, the Department contributes to medical, pharmacy, and graduate education in anatomy and neuroscience. I was also the founding Director of NEOMED’s Hearing Research Group. My own research, concerning brain mechanisms underlying sound perception and emotional responses to social vocalizations, has been continually funded by NIDCD for the past 30 years.

Area of Expertise/Research Interests

I study how emotional brain centers interact with the auditory system to establish the meaning of speech and other social vocalizations. Interpreting these social signals requires information about acoustic structure, other sensory stimuli, and internal state. I examine mechanisms acting within the amygdala to integrate across these information sources, and seek to relate these mechanisms to acoustic communication behavior and to disorders resulting in altered emotional responses to speech.

Educational Background

• 1976 St. Louis University. St. Louis, Missouri
• Honors B.A. in Philosophy
• 1983 Indiana University School of Medicine. Bloomington, Indiana
• Ph.D. in Physiology; Minor in Neuroscience Studies

Publications

• Niemczura, A.C., Grimsley, J.M., Kim, C., Alkhawaga, A., Poth, A., Carvalho, A., and Wenstrup, J.J.,(2020) Physiological and behavioral responses to vocalization playback in mice. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 14:155. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00155.
• Wenstrup, J.J., Ghasemahmad, Z., Hazlett, E., Shanbhag, S. (2020) The amygdala – a hub of the social auditory brain. In: The Senses: Volume II Audition, B. Grothe, ed. Elsevier.
• Grimsley, J.M.S., Sheth, S., Vallabh, N., Grimsley, C, Bhattal, J., Latsko, M, Jasnow, A., and Wenstrup, J.J. (2016) Contextual modulation of vocal behavior in mouse: newly identified 12 kHz ‘mid-frequency’ vocalization emitted during restraint. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00038
• Gadziola, M.A., Shanbhag, S.J., and Wenstrup, J.J. (2016) Two distinct representations of social vocalizations in the basolateral amygdala. Journal of Neurophysiology. 115:868-886.
• Grimsley, J.M.S., Hazlett, E.G., and Wenstrup, J.J. (2013) Coding the meaning of sounds: contextual modulation of auditory responses in the basolateral amygdala. Journal of Neuroscience. 33:17538-17548.