Nigel Woolf

Nigel Woolf is Professor Emeritus of Surgery/Anatomy at the UC San Diego Medical School. Dr. Woolf trained under Edwin Gould and Murray Sachs in neurosciences (Sc.D., 1974) at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and then served as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University with Robert Capranica in the middle 1970's. Returning to Johns Hopkins University, Department of Biomedical Engineering as a Research Scientist he conducted the first single-unit auditory nerve neurophysiological studies in birds by studying Redwing Blackbirds (1976-1978). He accepted a faculty appointment at UC San Diego and the VA Medical Center San Diego in 1978 and has remained there to the present. Dr. Woolf's research has concentrated on normal hearing development and environmentally induced (e.g., virus, noise, ototoxic drugs, and aging) hearing pathology in mammals, including humans. Woolf's lab has established fundamental properties of neural encoding in the peripheral and central auditory nervous system, neuroanatomical properties of cell-specific populations, and cellular and molecular aspects of auditory system innate and adaptive immune system responses under normal and pathological conditions in the developing and adult brain. His animal studies helped motivate the initiation of the NIH mandate requiring universal screening of human newborns for congenital cytomegalovirus-induced sensorineural hearing loss. His research continues to contribute to the development of new otologic methods for the prevention and treatment of hearing loss induced by viral infection, noise exposure, and drug therapy. Dr. Woolf maintains an active comparative species research study program, and he continues to collaborate with international research scientists.