Chennai: Twenty years ago he worked on creating a telephone for hearing impaired children in Chennai while still a student at the Anna University. Now a full fledged professor , Khaleel A. Razak remains as innovative as ever and has even been awarded a five-year, $ 866,902 faculty early career development programme (CAREER) grant by the US National Science Foundation to carry on with his research into how the brain processes everyday sounds.
His aim? To find therapies for age-related hearing problems and the Fragile X Syndrome. “Age-related hearing loss is the most preventable hearing-related problem in the world,” explains the neuroscientist, who is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Riverside.
His research that involves study of mouse models of aging and the Fragile X Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, is aided by an in depth examination of the pallid bat.
“The pallid bat is a bit unusual among bats in that it uses echolocation for general orientation and obstacle avoidance, but listens for prey on the ground, like crickets, scorpions and millipedes,” Prof. Razak explains.
“We hope to identify neuron types that seem to be lost or changed during ageing. There may be combinations of behavioural or pharmacological therapies that could delay or prevent these changes.” The grant will support research on how the brain’s auditory cortex processes information about sound locations.
“Precise sound localisation can be a matter of life and death,” he explained. “The auditory cortex is necessary for sound localisation, but our understanding of the relevant neural processing is rudimentary.
