Andrea Hasenstaub PhD

Andrea Hasenstaub, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Coleman Memorial Laboratories in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (OHNS) at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her BS in Mathematics and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California; an M.Phil. in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University, England; and a PhD in Neurobiology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, followed by a fellowship at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Dr. Hasenstaub’s research is focused on understanding the genetic, cellular, and network operation of specific cell types in the mouse and human auditory cortex. One line of research focuses on inhibitory microcircuitry in normal and diseased brains. Within the cortex, diverse types of local circuit inhibitory neurons play vital roles in regulating and timing activity and are key mediators of long-term developmental plasticity. Central auditory processing disorders, such as hyperacusis or tinnitus, may result in part from the failure of cortical inhibitory networks to properly control the strength, timing, or plasticity of excitatory activity. These neurons' dysfunction is also implicated in broader neurodevelopmental disorders including schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and bipolar disorder. Treatments for these common and devastating diseases will require both a conceptual understanding of cortical interneurons' circuit functions and a mechanistic understanding of their interactions.

Our overall goal is to identify the conditions under which different kinds of cortical neurons are engaged, understand what computations they enable cortical networks to perform, and establish the biophysical and circuit mechanisms by which they allow these computations to occur. We hope that this will guide us in developing a low-level mechanistic understanding of how their plasticity in aging, hearing loss and other types of brain injury underlies the functional losses observed in these conditions.