About me

I became interested in otolaryngology while doing my undergraduate degree in medical school in China. This later led me to specialise in ENT during my master’s, which opened a whole new route of scientific research for me. I discovered that experimental scientific research serves as the foundation of clinical practice and was fascinated by it. My master’s project focused on molecular changes and the underlying mechanism in the stria vascularis in the mammalian cochlea under hypoxia. I chose this Ph.D. project because the development of the cochlea is crucial and I want to delve deeper into the inner ear research.

My Project

Sound is detected by extremely sensitive sensory cells, called hair cells, located in the inner ear. Hair cells transduce acoustic information and convert them into electrical signals that are sent to the brain via auditory nerve fibres. During pre-hearing stages of development, the hair cells elicit spontaneous electrical activity to induce neurotransmitter release onto auditory nerve fibre. This spontaneous activity is crucial to the refinement of both the cochlear sensory epithelium and the central auditory pathway. Studies in isolated cochleae have provided us with some characteristic of this activity, but nothing has been confirmed in vivo. This has created a substantial barrier towards our understanding of how the cochlea develop and function, since ex vivo work cannot replicate its sophisticated anatomy, innervation and physiology. I will use transgenic animals and 2-photon imaging to understand the mechanisms that modulate and pattern the spontaneous firing activity in the developing mammalian cochlea in vivo, and how these influence central auditory refinement.