Hey-Kyoung Lee
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
When one sense is lost, the brain adapts to sharpen the others. Blind people, for example, often hear better, even when vision is lost in adulthood.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
crossmodal plasticity
sensory deprivation
synaptic plasticity
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2031
What they work on
- Determine how early- and late-onset visual deprivation changes three corticothalamic feedback pathways from auditory cortex (Ntsr1, Cplx3/Drd1a and Rbp4 neurons) in adult mice, using optogenetics.
- Test whether visual deprivation alters how corticothalamic circuits regulate incoming sound pathways and auditory behavior, using pharmacogenetic manipulation of circuit elements.
- Measure how visual deprivation changes sound encoding by corticothalamic neurons, using multiphoton calcium imaging in mice performing auditory tasks.
- Identify the circuits that recruit the deprived primary visual cortex (V1) for processing other senses after adult-onset visual deprivation in mice.
- Determine how adult-onset hearing loss strengthens feedforward visual circuits in V1 to enhance and refine visual processing.
More about the research
The adult brain is usually thought to change less easily than a young one, so this compensation shows that adult circuits can still rewire. Both of the PI's projects use mice to study how the brain's sensory areas adapt when vision or hearing is removed in adulthood. The goal is to find the circuits that could be targeted to improve sensory function.
Why it matters
The adult brain's limited ability to rewire restricts efforts to improve sensory function later in life. Identifying the circuits that let temporary loss of one sense reopen plasticity in another could point to targets for enhancing perception. The work could also inform therapies that improve visual processing and learning, or hearing, in adults, including people who have lost vision or hearing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Maria Geffen
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Train mice by operant conditioning to detect or discriminate target sounds in background noise, and vary noise contrast before each target to test how adaptation to the background interacts with target detection.
Hiroyuki Kato
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
Map the fast non-lemniscal auditory pathway from the cochlear nucleus through the thalamus to cortical layer 6 in mice, using anatomical tracing and in vivo single-unit recordings.
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.