Sarah M. N. Woolley

Sarah M. N. Woolley is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. Her work centers on the neuroscience of communication, using songbirds to understand how the brain learns and understands vocal communication.

Sarah M. N. Woolley
Alma materUniversity of Colorado Boulder, BA, 1991
University of Washington, PhD, 1999
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology, Neurobiology
InstitutionsUniversity of Washington
University of California, Berkeley
Columbia University
ThesisAuditory feedback and song behavior in adult Bengalese finches (1999)
Doctoral advisorEdwin Rubel

Academic career

Woolley received her Bachelors of Arts in 1991 from University of Colorado Boulder, studying biology and psychology. She then attended the University of Washington School of Medicine, where she received her PhD in 1999 in neurobiology and Behavior in the laboratory of Edwin Rubel.[1] Her research centered on how Bengalese finches learn and maintain songs. She found that while male Bengalese finches do not typically change their song patterns in adulthood, their song patterns require auditory feedback.[2] As a result, if a finch becomes deaf, his song will degrade in about one week. Woolley, however, found that not all sound frequencies are required to maintain a male finch's song.[3] Finches that lost the ability to hear in high-frequency ranges maintained their ability to sustain a consistent song pattern. She also noted that these finches can regenerate auditory hair cells, which can restore hearing within eight weeks following damage to them.[4][5]

For her postdoctoral fellowship, she stayed at the University of Washington, where she performed work to understand the avian auditory midbrain (or the mesencephalicus lateralis, dorsalis, MLd) of zebra finches, which processes multiple parallel inputs and conveys that processed information to the forebrain.[6] She noted that different tones were processed over time in the auditory midbrain and found that this brain region is well-suited to encoding complex sounds with a high degree of temporal accuracy, rather than just responding to specific sound cues.[7]

In 2001, Woolley began a second postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the way zebra finches were able to distinguish vocalizations of specific individuals and also differentiate vocalizations from other sounds.[8] She found that the finch's auditory neurons were better able to more accurately distinguish between different zebra finch songs than between synthetic sound segments, suggesting that their neurons are more finely tuned to understanding finch vocalizations. She looked at how single neurons and populations of neurons in the auditory midbrain encode song versus generic noise. She found that the majority of auditory midbrain neurons were able to consistently and precisely tune in to finch vocalizations, while they exhibited a high degree of variability in response to generic noise.[9]

Research

In 2006, Woolley joined the faculty at Columbia University in the Department of Psychology. Between 2013 and 2016 she served as Chairperson for the department and in 2014 became an elected member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.[10]

Her lab studies the underlying neuroscience of the ways bengalese, zebra, and long-tailed finches learn, perform, and understand vocalizations as a model to better understand how humans communicate through sound in a variety of contexts. Her lab has studied the effects of song upon mating choice.[11][12][13] All songbird brains are finely tuned to convert sound waves to social messages. Woolley's group found that male and female brains are tuned and wired in different ways.[14]

Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.[15][16][17]

Awards and honors
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References
  1. Woolley, Sarah (1999-07-01). "Auditory feedback and song behavior in adult Bengalese finches". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. Woolley, Sarah; Rubel, Edwin (1997-09-01). "Bengalese Finches Lonchura Striata Domestica Depend upon Auditory Feedback for the Maintenance of Adult Song". The Journal of Neuroscience. 17 (16): 6380–90. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.17-16-06380.1997.
  3. Woolley, Sarah; Rubel, Edwin (1999-02-01). "High-Frequency Auditory Feedback Is Not Required for Adult Song Maintenance in Bengalese Finches". The Journal of Neuroscience. 19: 358–71. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.19-01-00358.1999.
  4. Woolley, Sarah M.N.; Wissman, Anne Marie; Rubel, Edwin W (March 2001). "Hair cell regeneration and recovery of auditory thresholds following aminoglycoside ototoxicity in Bengalese finches". Hearing Research. 153 (1–2): 181–195. doi:10.1016/s0378-5955(00)00217-3. ISSN 0378-5955.
  5. Woolley, Sarah; Rubel, Edwin (2002-10-01). "Vocal Memory and Learning in Adult Bengalese Finches with Regenerated Hair Cells". The Journal of Neuroscience. 22 (17): 7774–87. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.22-17-07774.2002.
  6. Woolley, Sarah; Casseday, John (2004-02-01). "Response Properties of Single Neurons in the Zebra Finch Auditory Midbrain: Response Patterns, Frequency Coding, Intensity Coding, and Spike Latencies". Journal of Neurophysiology. 91 (1): 136–51. doi:10.1152/jn.00633.2003. PMID 14523072.
  7. Woolley, Sarah; Casseday, John (2005-09-01). "Processing of Modulated Sounds in the Zebra Finch Auditory Midbrain: Responses to Noise, Frequency Sweeps, and Sinusoidal Amplitude Modulations". Journal of Neurophysiology. 94 (2): 1143–57. doi:10.1152/jn.01064.2004. PMID 15817647.
  8. Woolley, Sarah; Fremouw, Thane; Hsu, Anne; Theunissen, Frédéric (2005-11-01). "Tuning for spectro-temporal modulations as a mechanism for auditory discrimination of natural sounds". Nature Neuroscience. 8 (10): 1371–9. doi:10.1038/nn1536. PMID 16136039.
  9. Woolley, Sarah; Gill, Patrick; Theunissen, Frédéric (2006-04-01). "Stimulus-dependent auditory tuning results in synchronous population coding of vocalizations in the songbird midbrain". The Journal of Neuroscience. 26 (9): 2499–512. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3731-05.2006. PMID 16510728.
  10. "Sarah Woolley". zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu. 2017-03-06. Retrieved 2018-10-13.
  11. "Some Songbirds Have Brains Specially Designed to Find Mates for Life". Retrieved 2018-10-26.
  12. "Wooing with Song and Mating for Life". Psychology Today. Retrieved 2018-10-26.
  13. "Scientist Studies Brain Process of Songbirds". NPR.org. Retrieved 2018-10-26.
  14. Calabrese, Ana; Woolley, Sarah M. N. (2015-03-17). "Coding principles of the canonical cortical microcircuit in the avian brain". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (11): 3517–3522. doi:10.1073/pnas.1408545112. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 4371993. PMID 25691736.
  15. "NSF Award Search: Award#0920081 - Co-evolution of auditory coding and vocal behavior". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  16. "NSF Award Search: Award#1656825 - Adaptations for mate choice: perceptual mechanisms in species with highly divergent communication signals". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  17. generator, metatags. "Project Information - NIH RePORTER - NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results". projectreporter.nih.gov. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  18. "Searle Scholars Program : Sarah M.N. Woolley (2007)". www.searlescholars.net. Retrieved 2018-10-12.
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