Professor of Mathematics Brian Fischer Awarded NIH Funds

Professor of Mathematics Brian Fischer, PhD, along with longtime collaborators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and others, was recently awarded funds from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) for two projects focused on understanding neurological auditory systems.

• For the first project, funded through the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program, Dr. Fischer and a team of international collaborators will examine fundamental mechanisms involved in the visual-auditory pathways of barn owls.
  
  
• The second project, funded through the Brain Research through Advancing Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, investigates network connectivity and cellular computation in the auditory systems of barn owls to shed light on how neural mechanisms produce normal and learned behavior.

Dr. Fischer, a computational neuroscientist, will lead modeling and data analysis for both projects. Funding will enable Dr. Fischer to engage two undergraduate students per year over three years for each year, for a total of 18 undergraduate research experiences.