Patrick Kanold

kanold

Dr. Kanold is a neuroscientist and engineer (neuroengineer!) studying the auditory cortex. He is interested in how the brain computes information about the world and how this representation is shaped by experience. He has discovered the key role of a special population of neurons in the developing brain, the subplate neurons. The Kanold lab was one of the first to use optical approaches to discover that “maps” of frequency preference in auditory cortex were disordered on a local scale challenging prior textbook dogma. The Kanold lab was also the first to optically dissect auditory cortical circuits across the lifespan and to show that experience even before ear opening and activation of layer 4 in rodents can shape subplate neuron circuits. His lab combines and further develops in vivo and in vitro optical and electrophysiological methods, high throughput behavioral approaches, and computational analyses to study the circuits and mechanisms underlying auditory perception and plasticity (Kavli profile here).

Dr. Kanold has been on the faculty of the Telluride Workshop for Neuromorphic Cognition, the Neurobiology Course at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, the Oxford Autumn School in Neuroscience. His work has been funded by multiple grants from NIH, AFOSR, etc. and he has been serving on many study sections. Dr. Kanold enjoys working with a diverse group of humans and Dr. Kanold’s trainees have won Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards from NIH, Wellcome Alliance Fellowship, Hearing Research Foundation Award, CDRMP grant, and NIH R21 as well as multiple research awards.

Training

Dr. Kanold studied Electrical Engineering at TU-Berlin focussing on microelectronics and VLSI chip design. He became interested in neuroscience while working on VLSI chipsets for an HDTV decoder. He pursued his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University working with Drs. Eric Young and Paul Manis. He studied multi-sensory integration and discovered that dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) cells receive inputs from pinna muscle receptors and how biophysical specializations enable DCN cells to represent both ear position and sound information. Intrigued by the intricacy of neuronal circuits and the ability of the brain to wire up itself using internally generated “spontaneous” activity , after his Ph.D., Dr. Kanold joined the laboratory of Dr. Carla Shatz at Harvard to immerse himself in neural circuit development. He discovered that subplate neurons, a largely transient cell population, are required for the functional maturation of visual responses and thalamocortical synapses in the visual cortex, as well as normal ocular dominance plasticity.