Development of Sensory Organs

Guy Richardson obtained BSc in Neurobiology (Hons) at the University of Sussex in 1974, and then did a PhD at the Max Planck Institut fur biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen where he used the electromotor system of the electric ray, Torpedo marmorata, as a model system for studying the development of cholinergic motorneurorones and their synapses. He received his DPhil in 1980 and, after four years of postdoctoral research in Germany, returned to Sussex in 1984 to work on the inner ear, a sensory system that has remained the focus of his studies ever since. His work at Sussex has included the development of a cochlear culture system for studying, together with Professors Corne Kros and Ian Russell, the mechanisms of mechano-electrical transduction in mammalian sensory hair cells, the discovery of novel extracellular matrix molecules and cell surface proteins associated with the tectorial membrane and sensory hair bundles of the inner ear, the generation transgenic mouse models for elucidating the basis of various forms of human hereditary deafness, and studies on the mechanisms of antibiotic-induced ototoxicity. Guy was recipient of the Grand Prix Scientifique NRJ from the Institut de France in 2005. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2009 and to the Academy of Medical Science in 2013.

Dr. Wu received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, her master’s degree from the Department of Physiology at the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Anatomy (currently the Department of Neurobiology) at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She received her postdoctoral training from the Mental Retardation Center (now the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center) at UCLA and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. She joined the NIDCD in 1993 and has published many papers on the molecular mechanisms underlying inner ear development.