Edwin W. Rubel

Edwin W. Rubel is the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Profesor of Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington. He also holds appointments as Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, adjunct Professor of Psychology, and director of Research for the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Michigan State University, where he studied physiological development of the cerebral cortex. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at UC, Irvine, he started his own laboratory. Dr. Rubel has studied development of hearing, development of the inner ear, and development of the brain pathways involved in hearing in laboratory animals since 1972. He founded the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington in 1989. He has published over 230 scientific papers, edited 5 books and won many honors including the Jacob Javitz Award and the 2005 Award of Merit from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. Among Dr. Rubel's research contributions are a long series of studies on the role of experience on development of the lower brain pathways that process auditory information. These studies have examined the critical role the neural activity plays during development of the auditory system. In 1986-1990 Dr. Rubel and his colleagues discovered that birds regenerate inner ear hair cells after the cells die due to excessive noise exposure or ototoxic drugs and that the regeneration restores hearing. These discoveries formed the basis for a new field of hearing research attempting to induce the regenerative capacity in the mammalian inner ear. Finally, Dr. Rubel and his colleagues have recently become interested in the question of why inner ear hair cells die and how to prevent it. By developing new screening methods based on the ability to image hair cells in live zebrafish they are discovering new genes and drugs that modify the susceptibility of hair cells to damaging agents such as drugs, loud noise and, hopefully, aging.