Dr. George Pollak
Office: PAT 337
phone: (512) 471-4352
lab: 471-4849
email:
George Pollak received his Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Maryland Medical School in1970. After completing his postdoctoral work in the Department of Biology at Yale University, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas in 1973. Dr. Pollak has had extensive collaborations with scientists both in the U.S. and in Europe. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Frankfurt, the University of Munich, the Neuroscience Institute of Salamanca University in Spain, and at the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington Medical School. His research has earned numerous awards, including a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, a prestigious Alexander Von Humboldt Award, and a Claude Pepper Award from National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders in recognition of his contributions to auditory neuroscience. Dr. Pollak also received a President's Associates Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Texas and is Professor of Neurobiology there.
Research Interests
Since our perceptions of the world are constructed by the brain, understanding how the circuits of the sensory pathways extract information, and how neuronal populations represent features of the external world are of central importance, not only for our understanding of the brain, but for our understanding of ourselves. These are the principal issues that direct my research. Specifically, I study the mammalian auditory system and evaluate how the auditory system processes communication signals and the cues that enable animals to associate a sound with its location in space.
The animals that I use for experimental subjects are echolocating bats. I use bats as subjects because they are mammals, and thus their auditory systems are mammalian in design but are greatly enlarged and express both anatomical and physiological features with exceptional clarity due to the high premium they place on hearing. In addition, and most importantly, we know what sounds are important to them and what information they have to extract from those sounds as they pursue their daily lives.
Like all animals, bats have to know what a sound is and where in space it came from. Projects that address “what the sound is” investigate how the brain decodes and represents species-specific social communication signals, while studies that address “where it is” focus on how the brain processes and represents the cues for locating a sound in space. We do this by recording from individual nerve cells to evaluate how they respond to these complex signals. We then dissect how those response features are created by the circuits in the brain, either by iontophoresing drugs that block inhibitory receptors or by reversibly inactivating lower nuclei that innervate the neurons from which we record. In this way we determine what rules the auditory system employs to create response selectivity and diversity and how each nucleus in the circuit contributes to the implementation of those rules. Thus, my research efforts are directed at evaluating how circuits process the cues received at the ears and how those cues are represented in the higher regions of the auditory system by populations of neurons.