Micheal Dent, Ph.D.
Micheal Dent, Ph.D.
Meet the Researcher
Dent received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in physiology at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. A 2019 Emerging Research Grants scientist, Dent is a psychology professor at the University at Buffalo and the recipient of the Les Paul Foundation Award for Tinnitus Research.
I have always been fascinated by illusions. My research is to try to figure out ways to get an animal to “tell” you they are experiencing an illusion—such as tinnitus. One behavioral methodology that minimizes the problems was an identification method developed by my colleagues. This method separates hearing loss and motivation from tinnitus. It had not yet been used on a mouse, however, and mice are not as easy to train compared with other rodents or birds. My lab brainstormed and developed a system for studying tinnitus in mice using this methodology, with slight modifications. Results from our first few mouse subjects living in noise match those from rats injected with sodium salicylate to induce tinnitus, which is promising.
I originally wanted to become an elementary school teacher. At my small liberal arts college, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the human development track overlapped with the psychology track, and I found myself in a “sensation and perception” class at the same time I was in a “psychology of learning” lab. In the former, I learned about processing visual and auditory information, and was fascinated by how our sensory systems fool us. In the latter, we had our own rat for a semester and I trained mine using classical and operant conditioning techniques that taught me all sorts of principles of learning and motivation. Hooked, I immediately switched majors to psychology.
My mother-in-law suffers from hearing loss. For years, she didn’t wear her hearing aids and became isolated from conversations. She wears them regularly now, but I think some irreversible damage was done, in terms of social isolation and now dementia. This has brought home the importance of healthy communication while aging.
When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut. My terrible air- and seasickness made me decide not to pursue that, however! If I had not become a researcher, I would have liked to run a zoo. Watching animals is fascinating, and it has definitely shaped my career interests.
I was a military brat growing up. I lived in Germany, Italy, Texas, Taiwan, Florida, Japan, England, and Maryland—all before I hit high school. I am married to a pilot, so whenever I get too restless these days, I talk my husband into skipping town to visit somewhere new.
Micheal Dent, Ph.D., received the Les Paul Foundation Award for Tinnitus Research. We thank the Les Paul Foundation for its support of innovative research to increase our understanding of the mechanisms, causes, diagnosis, and treatment of tinnitus. She is also a 2006 ERG recipient.
The Research
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Noise-induced tinnitus in mice
Animal models of tinnitus have employed many different behavioral techniques, only one of which is not subject to motivational issues and changes in auditory acuity. Tinnitus has previously been induced in rats following a sodium salicylate injection. In the present proposal, this paradigm will be modified to investigate tinnitus in mice. These experiments as a whole aim to determine the time course of tinnitus and its recovery following nontraumatic noise exposures in mice. Until there is an objective measure that separates hearing loss from tinnitus, it is difficult to use mice to study tinnitus. This project seeks to define a way to measure and characterize tinnitus in the awake and behaving mouse model in order to compare this to humans with tinnitus.
Complex sound perception in birds
This study examines the abilities of birds to hear complex sounds in natural listening environments before, during, and following acoustic trauma. Birds are an excellent model for studies on hearing loss because, like humans, they learn and modify their vocalizations throughout their lives, and because, unlike humans, they are able to regenerate auditory sensory hair cells. This allows for experiments not only on hearing loss, but also on how hearing recovery occurs after a trauma and on how birds perceive the world when hearing is restored.
Long-term goal: To develop prevention and treatment strategies for tinnitus, a serious health condition affecting millions around the world.